


between two points of no return

by omphale23



Series: Personal Pineapples [1]
Category: Life, Standoff
Genre: Crossover, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-03-14
Updated: 2010-03-14
Packaged: 2017-10-08 00:18:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 46,540
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/70750
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/omphale23/pseuds/omphale23
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Matt also didn't go back to the bar looking for anyone with a familiar lean, a way of walking that made his chest hitch. Sometimes it was better to cut out before anything serious happened.</p>
            </blockquote>





	between two points of no return

**Author's Note:**

> Beta by [](http://sansets.dreamwidth.org/profile)[**sansets**](http://sansets.dreamwidth.org/), who is fantastic and knows when to say things aren't working. Complete notes are [HERE](http://omphale23.livejournal.com/320390.html), along with links to the VIDS by [caersmane](http://caersmane.livejournal.com) that started it all.

_A picture seen from within. The picture is unstable, a moving picture, unlimited drift.  
Still, the picture exists._

**George Oppen, "Route"**

*

Charlie took his badge off, and his wedding ring. The ring stung as it grazed a cut on the back of his finger. Should have gotten that looked at. Shouldn't have gone in alone.

He should be home right now. He shouldn't be looking for anyone, anything at all, but Charlie was tired of the things he shouldn't do. The list was long, and he loved Jen but she wasn't—something. He didn't know what he was looking for, just that he needed it and it might be here, in this enormous club with the flashing lights—red and blue, like a light bar, like the cruiser he shared with Bobby—and the music he didn't recognize.

Charlie took a deep breath, ran his hands down his sides, and nodded at the bouncer. No time like the present.

*

Matt hated clubs. They were dark and smoky and loud and just not his scene, but he was bored and between boyfriends and too long awake to make more of an effort than combing his hair and throwing on a pair of tight jeans. So here he was, leaning against the bar and watching boys try too hard, faces blurry as they slid and clung on the dance floor. He was leaning on the bar because he was tired—thirty-six hours on duty, but he couldn't sleep, not yet—and maybe a little because he wasn't sure he would still be vertical if he didn't.

*

Charlie felt out of place and his eyes hurt and none of these people were what he needed. The beers he'd swallowed fast when he showed up were bitter in his throat, and he switched to vodka until the edges of his vision were soft enough to be comfortable.

He roamed around the bar, sidestepping tiny boys who ran their fingers across his chest and guys who looked like linebackers and eyed him like they were hungry and he was a steak. None of them were quite real. None of them were what he wanted.

He wanted someone normal, someone who looked like ordinary only better, who—looked like the pretty guy against the bar, with a drink in his hand and a bored expression on his face. The guy licked his lip and raised the glass, and Charlie slid next to him and started a conversation.

*

Matt was just tossing back another shot before he gave it up and went home when somebody stepped up against his side and a voice muttered in his ear, "I hate this."

Matt smiled and shrugged. "It's not so bad. You get used to it after a few more drinks."

The guy, who was taller than him and wearing a ball cap and a jacket that looked like it was actually worn out, not just bought that way, flashed a grin, white in the shadows of the bar. He leaned in closer.

Matt smiled back, let his gaze roam lower, and nodded. He spun around too fast and almost stumbled as he headed for the back. At the door to the bathroom, he hesitated long enough that the guy crowded up against his back and wrapped his hands around Matt's hips, gave him a little shove.

Inside it was even darker, and Matt seriously couldn't understand how anyone managed to take a piss with no lights on. The guy pushed him into a stall, though, and then he was running his tongue down Matt's neck and sliding his fingers into Matt's belt loops to drag him closer and Matt stopped thinking about the lighting.

*

From there, it got a little blurry. More blurry.

Next thing he knew, Charlie was slamming the guy up against the bathroom wall, holding him in place while he dropped to his knees and pulled the buttons on the guy's fly, popped them open in a row and slipping his hand inside.

The guy was panting above him, head thrown back as his hips arched towards Charlie's hand. Charlie grinned and didn't think about anything but the moment, leaned in and licked a stripe up the guy's dick. When he heard a moan, a growled, "now, fuck, come on already," he took a deep breath and wrapped his lips around it, tasting and sucking as hard as he could.

The guy bucked, slammed his hands against the wall and groaned. Charlie took that as encouragement and tried a few other tricks he'd heard about. It didn't take long before the guy was shaking apart, legs twitching as he panted profanity and noises that Charlie had missed hearing since he married—no. That was something else. This was here and Charlie was here, now.

*

Matt let himself relax into the buzz of wanting, dizzy with booze and exhaustion and touch-starved nerves, rotating around the sensation of some stranger's breath against his hip, tongue on his dick, hand curled over his hip holding him still. He spun and spun and then let go, like sliding off a merry-go-round into the dirt.

*

Charlie was fumbling for his own zipper when the guy took a deep breath and reached his hand out, wrapped his fingers into Charlie's hair and pulled him upward. Charlie stood, and the guy slammed their mouths together, scrambled his fingers down Charlie's shirt and inside the top of his pants.

Charlie tasted blood and leaned back, wiped his sleeve across his mouth. Jen was going to have a fit about that, but the guy was unzipping Charlie's fly and he would worry about it later. His breath hitched and the guy spun them both around, smacked Charlie's head into the wall hard enough to bring tears to his eyes, and started running his fingers over Charlie's cock, calluses dragging against the head as he kissed Charlie hard and fast and messy, nipping at his lips. When Charlie moaned loud and low, he felt the guy grin against his jaw, speed up his strokes until Charlie turned his head, gasped and came, his legs going weak as he shook through it. He slumped forward onto the guy's shoulder, sucking in a few deep breaths.

The guy leaned against him, chuckled soft and dirty, and muttered, "That was fun. Next time, maybe we should try it on a bed."

Charlie stiffened, shoved him off, and started buttoning himself back up. "I—no, that wouldn't be a good idea. I don't do this, whatever this is. I'm sorry, this was a terrible idea." He didn't look at the guy's face, just fumbled with the latch and walked fast, out the door and through the bar and straight to his car, where he leaned against the trunk and threw up.

*

Matt stood for a minute, pants open and the taste of blood in his mouth, staring at the place the guy had been. This was why he hated bars. The sex was fantastic, but fuck, it never _went_ anywhere.

He spit into the sink, cleaned himself up and grabbed another drink. The whiskey stung against his lip, but he swallowed anyway. By the time he finished it and headed out to the parking lot the guy was long gone. It took him forever to find a cab, and his lip hurt, and he felt like a complete moron for thinking that this was anything like a good idea. He wanted to be drunker than this, or maybe not drunk at all.

He probably would have brooded about it longer than the one night, but the next day Charlie Crews was arrested and the whole department went crazy talking about the case. He didn't have time to think about all the ways that it was easier to sleep with women. About how they at least wanted to exchange names most of the time.

Matt also didn't go back to the bar looking for anyone with a familiar lean, a way of walking that made his chest hitch. Sometimes it was better to cut out before anything serious happened.

*

He drove around for a few hours, first to sober up and then to think about what he wanted to say when he did get home. Charlie didn't want to leave Jen, but this was—she probably wouldn't understand any of it. If she did, she'd still be angry, and she'd cry, and Charlie hated it when she cried.

He let himself in just before dawn, dropped his clothes—bloodstains on his sleeve and other things on the knees—in the hamper and fell asleep on the couch. He woke up hours later to somebody pounding on the door.

*

Charlie Crews was covered in bruises the day they met at Pelican Bay.

Matt thought they were exaggerating when he stopped to check his gun and his wallet, trying to scare him off, but when he walked into the infirmary Crews was lying in the bed asleep, and he _was_ covered in bruises. Matt had never seen so many spreading streaks of black and red and purple on just one person before. And the bruises were layered over yellow and green, crosshatched with abrasions and a ring of cuts that he'd swear was a set of puncture wounds from somebody's teeth. Whoever Crews pissed off, they'd been taking it out on him for a while.

The guy was a mess, and for a moment Matt thought about walking out, calling the whole thing off. Even if Crews could get in with somebody, give him something useful, it looked like the effort would get him killed. And nobody in their right mind would agree to that, ex-cop or not.

But this was his big break, his shot to get something nobody else had, and Matt was working on being ambitious and dedicated and maybe even good at his job. This could be his chance, the one that got him off the local force and in with the Bureau permanently. So he sat down next to the bed and waited for Crews to wake up.

It took a long time.

*

He thought maybe it would be nice to be dead for a while. Less painful, at least. But he wouldn't give his father the satisfaction of outliving him, and so Charlie kept breathing.

Eventually, he opened his eyes. And when he did, he wasn't alone. That was unexpected.

*

The second meeting was better. It was in a room with a solid steel door and Crews had his hands cuffed to the table, but at least he was sitting up. At least his face wasn't as swollen and his eyes were focused and he was talking in complete sentences.

Mostly complete sentences. Matt wasn't sure, but the conversational quirks were either left from the morphine or a sign of a lingering concussion. Or maybe Crews was just weird, period.

He was close enough to lucid for the corrections officers, and that was all that Matt needed. Lucid, and once Matt explained what they wanted, the people they needed information on, Crews got a flash in his eyes, like someone had switched him on. He asked a series of questions and then asked Matt to leave. The questions made Matt wonder what kind of cop he had been, before he became this.

He didn't say no, but he didn't say yes, either. Matt didn't know what that meant.

*

He was still a cop. Somewhere, underneath it all, there was that. That's what he kept, and when Flannery asked, Charlie knew he'd eventually agree, because if he didn't he wasn't a cop. And if he wasn't a cop, he was nothing at all.

*

The third time was the charm. Or the curse. Either way, when Matt walked into the room, Crews was waiting and he had this little smile on his face, like he knew something nobody else did. Like he was listening to a joke that wasn't quite funny.

The punch line was that Crews—Charlie—didn't have the common sense to tell Matt to fuck off. He was weird, and a convicted murderer, and possibly crazy, and Matt was decidedly _not_ thinking that despite all that, he was imperfectly handsome. But when he looked up from the table and grinned, Matt's breath hitched in his throat. Charlie looked like a memory, and he wasn't sure he wanted to think about why.

After that, they only talked about the cases. Matt's case, and sometimes, if he asked the right questions, Charlie's.

*

Flannery asked him to say _Matt_ and so Charlie did. There was no harm in it, just a name, a word. Charlie knew a lot of words, and Matt Flannery wanted some of them. That was easy enough. He could give Matt words and sentences and all the things he heard from people who didn't see him listening because he was invisible, when people weren't trying to kill him. Which they frequently did.

Getting past the fear of death wasn't as hard as he thought it would be. It was like riding a bicycle, or baking a cake. It just took practice.

*

Eventually somebody found out. Matt didn't ask questions, but the leak came from his end, not Charlie's, from some temp in records or maybe an agent looking for another step up the ladder. It didn't come from Charlie, and it sure as hell didn't come from Matt.

But the meetings got out, or maybe Charlie asked the wrong question, or one of the guards let slip that Matt had been coming to see him too often. And the next month, Matt had to walk to the infirmary again. The corridor was longer than he remembered.

This time it was 240—no, 241—stitches, and Matt looked down at the bed and felt his stomach turn over. He made it to the trash can, but only barely, and he didn't turn around to see if the rustling he heard was Charlie waking up or just the doctor, needling him back under. He didn't look back and when he got to the office, he made a few calls and cashed in some favors and when he was done, nobody was going to be able to lay a hand on Charlie again. Not even Matt.

*

He didn't go back to his cell after the infirmary.

Charlie didn't recognize the cell block they transferred him into, but he knew it. Knew it by the noises, the murmur of emptiness and loneliness and eternity.

He would go mad here, and no one would notice. No one would see him. Whoever had decided to lock him away in this place, with nothing but the walls and the lights and the echoing incoherence must hate him. Charlie had never hated anyone that much.

He wondered what he'd done wrong this time.

*

When Charlie started talking to himself, Matt got a message on a pink slip of paper. _Crews disassociated from reality_, which meant exactly nothing to Matt but he looked it up and it was bad. Definitely not a good thing.

Three months later, another note read _Crews unresponsive to environmental stimuli_ and Matt didn't need the DSM to decipher that one. He made more calls, but getting someone into solitary was a hell of a lot easier than getting them out, especially when they were sitting in a heap in a corner and refusing to eat or talk or blink.

Matt stopped reading the notes after that. He just crumpled them up and threw them away, a note every three months for four years. Seventeen notes. All of them crumpled and then flattened again and stacked under an unopened copy of _The Path to Zen_ in the bottom of his desk drawer.

*

There was the light, and then there was dark for a while. A long while, or maybe a short one. It didn't matter. There weren't any words for the dark, just noises and then silence.

At the end of the dark, there were words again. And Charlie opened his eyes.

*

There was no note eighteen; Matt got a phone call. Crews wanted out of solitary, or at least had pointed out that he was ready to live in a new moment, whatever that meant. Matt didn't care, he just wanted to get past this, whatever this was, and so when they asked he signed off on the transfer. If the Department of Corrections thought Crews—thought Charlie—was ready for the general population, Matt wasn't going to hold him back. He wasn't going back to Pelican Bay to talk Charlie out of it, to tell him that nothing had changed, that alive was better than dead. Matt was letting go and walking away.

No more notes meant that when he called Constance a few weeks later, he had no idea what he was sending her into. All Matt knew was that he owed Crews something, and he didn't have any other way to repay the debt. But it couldn't hurt to send him someone to talk to, someone else who would believe him.

*

Constance called him Charlie the day they met. Nobody had called him Charlie since—nobody called him Charlie now. They did then, before here, but not now.

Charlie asked to leave the room, and he asked to leave the second time, but Constance kept coming back. She was as stubborn as he had—she was persistent. She was annoying, sometimes, but she kept calling him Charlie and he didn't ask who told her his name.

*

Constance left voicemails, but Matt didn't pick up the phone. He let it ring, and listened later to her cautious optimism, and after that to her increasing excitement as she found more and more problems with the case.

Matt hadn't actually thought it would _work_. He started answering her calls, and they'd run down the new details. Constance would ask _can this be done_ and Matt would think about it, find any problems that the department might throw at her, and together they got most of the kinks ironed out.

Matt didn't ask her to tell Charlie anything, and she didn't pass on any messages. Just facts and dates and theories.

*

Constance listened. She talked, and she listened, and she treated Charlie like a person instead of a number. She believed him, even when he wasn't sure, and Charlie liked her faith. It was smooth and fresh and lovely to watch.

He borrowed her faith sometimes, to keep him calm when he walked back to his cell and fell asleep with the lights on. He even gave some of it to Ted, because faith was the sort of thing that could be shared without fading away.

*

Matt drove out to Pelican Bay the morning that Charlie was released. He didn't go in. He didn't wade past the clump of reporters hovering around the gates waiting for Charlie to emerge, not even when he saw them surge forward and start shouting.

He didn't tell Emily where he was going. It wasn't about them, about whatever they were doing, and he didn't want to explain just what it was about. For that, he'd have to know what he wanted from Charlie. Matt had no idea.

He did get out of the car, but then he leaned against the hood, suddenly unsure of what he had come to say. Maybe an apology, maybe not. Maybe he wanted to make a promise, but that didn't make any sense. Maybe he just wanted to make sure that Charlie was really out, that he wasn't broken and dead and gone.

He never did decide why he was there, but it didn't matter because Charlie didn't look up anyway. He kept his head down, walking fast between a couple of corrections officers, all the way to Constance's car, and when he folded himself into the passenger seat, Matt turned and got back into his own car and took the long way home.

*

The world outside was very bright and sometimes noisy. It had fruit, and Constance, and long hot solitary showers and eventually, when he asked about him, Ted.

It was pretty, but Charlie saw past that. It was pretty and deadly and somewhere out in it was the man who had taken Charlie's life from him. He just needed to be patient to find that man. Charlie was very patient.

*

The LAPD called eleven weeks after Emily decided they weren't going to work out after all. Nineteen weeks after Charlie got out of prison. Not that Matt was counting. He just had a lot of time on his hands these days, and there was a calendar on his cell phone that blinked to tell him time was passing.

But that wasn't the phone that rang the day the LAPD called. The phone that rang was his desk phone, and on the other end of the line was Charlie Crews.

Charlie didn't remember him. He was all business, and Matt wasn't bothered by that, wasn't surprised. It had been years—ten years, five months, two weeks, but who was counting—since they'd spoken, and they'd only met a dozen times, and in between Charlie had been slightly insane. He couldn't be expected to remember Matt's name, or his voice.

*

Matt Flannery worked for the FBI now. Constance gave Charlie his number, because she knew Matt from some function or other and thought he could help, thought he might be able to talk Ramirez down. Thought he could do it fast and without explosions, and Charlie had been explicitly warned against anything that might involve explosions this time.

Charlie called because it was best to face the past. Only by facing the past could he move forward.

And forward was a good place. Forward was motion. Motion was progress. Except when it wasn't.

Charlie called, but the first three times he hung up before the call went through. On the fourth try, he was ready. He was a cop, not a convict. He knew where he belonged.

*

Matt didn't even see Charlie on their first case together. He was outside the whole time, trying to find a way to stop a guy with a death wish and a guilty conscience, while Charlie was kicking in doors and being what Matt was absolutely convinced could only be called a _complete fucking idiot_. And then the building blew, and Charlie was inside, Matt knew he was, because just before it went up he heard Charlie shout _police_ and that was always, _always_ when things went to hell.

He didn't know where Charlie's partner when it happened, but if Matt found her at the hospital he was going to kick her ass. Right after he kicked Charlie's.

He walked into the hospital room carefully, and he kept his eyes open and stared at the floor and counted the tiles. When he dragged his head up to look at the bed, Charlie was sitting up and eating what looked like an apple. An apple. Where did he even _get_ an apple in here?

Matt took a deep breath. "You are an idiot, Crews."

Charlie ignored him.

"You are an idiot and if you ever pull a stunt like that again, I'm going to strangle you. Do you understand that? I didn't spend all that time working to get you out of prison just to watch you get yourself killed six months later. Don't do it, because I will bring you _back_ from the dead just for the pleasure of killing you with my bare hands. Idiot." Matt glared at Charlie, who was watching him with a bewildered smile on his face.

Behind Matt, someone coughed. He spun, and it was the partner, Reese, who was definitely next on his list. She looked amused. "He can't hear you, you know. Concussion grenade does that sometimes. You must be the FBI guy. Says so on your vest."

Matt didn't answer. From the bed, Charlie said loudly, "Matt. Long time no see. That's Dani Reese, she's my new partner. The food is better here than in prison, did you know that?"

*

The silence was back. Charlie woke up in an ambulance but the silence was back and so he closed his eyes again. He was stronger than the silence this time. He hoped.

When he opened his eyes again, he was in a bed in a room with machines that were blinking and people who were saying things he couldn't hear. They wore white coats and he shook his head, but it didn't help.

They looked startled when he asked for a mango or maybe a pear or even an orange, he didn't care as long as it was fresh, please, and could he have it now? Because that would be good. That would be something that meant outside, not inside, and he didn't need the reassurance but it would be nice. To have that.

The universe brought him an apple, and then it brought him Matt, who was trying to tell him something important. Charlie knew he was angry, but he smiled anyway. It was good to see Matt again. He had worried it wouldn't be, but Matt was still something good to see. He was still Matt, or was Matt again.

Charlie told himself that the Matt who walked away, who didn't stop them from bringing down the silence, was someone else. A different person, like Charlie was a different person.

And now Reese was back. She would like Matt. They could talk about how annoying Charlie was, and that would make them both happy.

*

Matt thought that was it, done, he'd tried to explain and it wasn't his fault that Charlie couldn't hear him. And how often could Charlie Crews end up working with an FBI negotiator, really? They'd barely see each other, and Matt would get over whatever this was, a crush or a guilt complex or something with a lot of syllables that Emily would have been able to explain, if she didn't sigh and change the subject every time he called and mentioned Charlie's name.

She was strangely reluctant to give him advice on this, which had something to do with her new job or the distance or maybe the fact that she didn't care all that much whether he managed to work this out.

*

He didn't hope for more chances to see Matt, but when they were given to him, Charlie didn't complain. In the LAPD, not complaining about something was akin to requesting it, and Reese shrugged and rolled her eyes and didn't glare at him about all the polyester jackets they ended up wearing. It was her version of a blessing.

Charlie watched Matt Flannery a lot when they worked together. Matt was a puzzle, because he was there and not there. Charlie made Matt nervous even when he wasn't trying. Matt was puzzles within riddles within a man who looked like he wanted someone to break him open and climb inside.

Constance said he was projecting, but Charlie didn't agree. He was curious, that was all.

*

Dani started it. She was complaining about picking Charlie up from the bus stop, which meant that Charlie helpfully explained why she would do that, and that LA had a subway system. The entire conversation was destined to end badly.

Matt had assumed that the possibility that someone else in LA would be forced to shoot holes in his own goddamned car—with his partner's help, and not that he was still pissed about that or anything—was zero to nothing, and so far he was right. But even that impossible coincidence was more likely than a brand new car getting run over by a tractor stuck in reverse driven by a cellmate-turned-financial-advisor. That had to have negative probability.

Things like this just seemed to follow Charlie around like butterflies or something less queer. It was maybe a result of the new zen thing, or maybe just that Charlie was fucking weird and never knew when to shut up, and talking was a bad habit that made people want to hit him with bats or tire irons or bullets. One of these days, it was going to get him killed.

Either way, at the start? It was Dani's fault. Dani asked the question, and because of the question Matt gave Charlie a ride home from the bar that night, and they sat and listened to the radio the whole way out while Matt tried to figure out a way to ask if Charlie remembered him at all from then, from before. Because of Dani, they passed the late-night taco stand, and Charlie suddenly said that he was starving and could go for a burrito, and Matt pulled into the parking lot and cut the engine. They sat there in the dark and the quiet for a few moments.

The neon of the sex-shop across the street was humming pink and purple across Charlie's face when Matt couldn't stand another second of silence and turned his head. Charlie was staring at him.

Matt couldn't help filling in the space between them. "What? Something wrong? Changed your mind? We can go somewhere else. I never trust a taco place that can be packed up and rolled away."

Charlie's face went blank. "No, I'm just deciding if I should wait longer, or give you some sort of hand signal that means _hey, remember that time you asked me to risk my life getting you information from a bunch of inmates, and then bailed on me when things got interesting?_"

Matt swallowed a couple of times, but no words came out.

"What would the hand signal for that be, anyway? I think it would be complicated, but maybe not. I suppose I don't need it."

When Charlie looked away, twitching his hand across the dashboard, Matt found his voice. "I'm sorry. You have no idea how—"

Charlie cut him off. "Sorry for what? It was your job, I wasn't doing anything else just then, the universe brought us together and then you walked away. Water under the bridge."

"Charlie, you ended up—you were just—I couldn't—"

Crews gave him a measuring look. "I said it's water under the bridge. In the past, and this is not the past, this is now. Did you win the case?"

Matt nodded.

"That's good." Charlie took a deep breath. "So, how about some food? I think I want a quesadilla, not a burrito. Do you think they have those?" Charlie twisted himself to get out of the car, and that was that, they went back to talking about sports and restaurants and crazy cases for the rest of the night.

And so it was pretty clear that when he and Charlie ended up in Charlie's driveway, when Charlie leaned over and quirked one side of his face into something that looked like a threat and a smile, when Matt nodded and wrapped his hand around Charlie's neck and pulled him closer, it was Dani Reese's fault.

It was her fault that they kissed until Matt's head was spinning, until Charlie was panting up against him and they were both scrambling to get out of their seatbelts and clutching at each other. That they stopped and Matt arched forward and into Charlie, misjudged the angle and caught his lip on Charlie's teeth.

It wasn't Dani's fault that Charlie stopped, his expression unreadable, and grabbed his jacket and shot out of the car like his ass was on fire as Matt muttered, "Charlie, fuck, just—don't you have furniture or something? I'm too old for sex in my fucking car." Matt didn't know whose fault that was.

*

Matt tasted like old mistakes, like a night Charlie didn't think about, hadn't thought about in years. Kissing Matt was vodka and copper-twang and muffled bass rhythms. It was red and blue and loss and anger and it was much, much too loud in Charlie's head when it all slipped into place.

Matt then and Matt later and Matt now, and Charlie didn't know which one he wanted, who he needed Matt to be, and so he ran. They were all connected, and if he stayed he'd start thinking about other times, other places.

Matt wasn't stupid. If Charlie stayed, he'd figure it out, and Charlie didn't want that conversation. Not now. Not yet. Not when he couldn't see how it all fit together. He needed to think about it, and then he'd know what to do next.

*

The first time Charlie fucked him was eighteen days after he got out of the hospital for the third time, which was three months after he got out of it the first time. It was also nine weeks after Charlie stopped answering his phone for a few days, and then showed back up and acted like nothing had happened in Matt's car.

Matt still wasn't entirely sure how they got from point A to point 12, but he wasn't complaining.

He'd picked Charlie up from a doctor's appointment, because something had happened to his car involving bullets and gasoline again—and Matt was not asking questions about that, because when he did Reese had threatened to kill them both and stormed out—and it was late enough that Charlie had smiled to see him, the smile that made Matt's stomach tighten and his jaw clench.

Charlie hadn't noticed that Matt stomped on the accelerator a little hard. "I could go for some dinner. Are you hungry? I think we have some takeout menus back at the house, or maybe Ted will be cooking something. Either way, what do you think?"

Matt wanted to say no. He wanted to drop Charlie at the door to his enormous new house and drive home and not repeat any part of the conversation Charlie hadn't heard the first time, the one that made Reese glare at Matt and twist her lips and pointedly _not_ interfere in that annoying interfering way she had. He wanted to run away, but instead he agreed.

Ted wasn't home, and the note said not to expect him back soon so Matt at least dodged that conversation. They ordered awful Mexican food and Matt ate quietly, listening to Charlie talk about his current case and working up the nerve to tell Charlie the whole thing. It took him until dessert—vanilla ice cream, and Matt wasn't sure why that seemed like the only possible choice, but it did—and then coffee to finally decide how to start.

Only thing was, as soon as the words, "We need to talk about what happened," came out of Matt's mouth, Charlie got this manic grin on his face and started stripping out of his clothes.

Matt was used to rolling with the punches, but this was a bit much.

Charlie got down to his pants, and Matt stared at his bowl of ice cream as the rustling continued and Charlie's belt buckle rang against the floor tiles.

*

Charlie hadn't been able to resist the pull of unwrapping Matt and seeing what made him work, and now he was about to find out and he wasn't ready yet.

Charlie had discovered, now that he was back in the world, that most awkward conversations could be avoided by offering fruit, if work was involved, or taking off his clothes, if it wasn't.

It was a simple system, but the best plans were those with no extra details. When Matt flinched, when his fingers tightened around the spoon, Charlie hesitated, but then Matt bit his lip and lifted his chin and met Charlie's eyes and that was enough. Charlie leaned forward, bit Matt's lip and kissed him while Matt stood up, while they stumbled back from the table and crashed into the counter. He slid his hands under Matt's shirt and dragged it up and off, dropping it on the floor as he walked backwards, pulled Matt by his belt through the house and out the door to the patio.

He stopped a few feet from the door and slid his hand down Matt's back, pulled him tight as Matt moaned into his mouth. Matt was gasping against him, and Charlie backed away, watched his fingers working at Matt's clothes, unbuckling and unbuttoning and unzipping—he didn't waste time regretting that Matt had stopped wearing his jeans tight at some point, because regret was most of the problem—and when Matt shuddered as Charlie pushed all his layers to the ground, Charlie let himself smile.

Naked, alone, in the dark without the flashes of history and time and things that they couldn't talk about, Charlie reached for Matt and pulled him close enough to touch.

He knew the way, even in the dark. Charlie kept his eyes closed and stepped back, back, back, until he felt the edge of the pool under his feet. And then he took another step, and they fell together.

*

When Matt woke up in Charlie's bed, the sheets were still warm and the shower was running. He left a note.

*

Charlie pushed at Matt's edges to keep him off-balance. To keep him from noticing that this was all ephemeral, smoke and mirrors and the moment before the crash.

*

Matt was beginning to wonder if it was even possible for Charlie to hold a normal conversation. He hadn't been this bad in prison all those years ago, or maybe he'd hidden it better. Maybe Matt just hadn't been listening very carefully the first time.

These days, Matt did a lot of talking to empty air, because Charlie somehow wasn't there.

*

He said a lot of meaningless things and ate a lot of fruit and braced himself for the day it stopped working, the day Matt remembered and disappeared. The day it would end.

*

Charlie was on the ground, winded and gasping, when Matt finally got there. The perp was unconscious a few feet away, and Matt kept his gun trained on him, even while he watched Charlie for evidence that he needed to get his head examined. Again.

Charlie blinked up from the dirt. "I'm fine. Just a little dizzy."

Matt was calm. He was. Cool and collected and not at all freaking out. "I will shoot you if you do that again, Crews. The next time you take off like that, I will fucking shoot you in the leg. I will aim my service weapon in your direction and I will pull the trigger and I _will not miss_. You're fast but not that fast and I'm a pretty good shot, because now that I'm working with you on a regular basis I've been practicing more often. I spend a lot of time firing at targets and you are going to be one of them if you don't knock it off with the heroics."

Charlie leaned up on his elbows, but Matt was standing too close for him to lever himself off the ground, and there was no way he was giving Charlie a hand up. Not yet. "You are going to end up with a bullet somewhere painful if this happens again. And then there will be an investigation, and I'll have to explain that no, I didn't do it by accident, my gun didn't slip and go off, I did it because you are a _complete asshole_ and took your earpiece out to go sprinting after an armed suspect and so I had _no choice_ but to shoot you." Matt gestured to Reese to keep her eye on the suspect, who was showing no signs of waking up. He didn't think about what Charlie must have done to knock the guy out.

"I will have to tell them that I shot you for your own damn good, and I would happily do it again if necessary." He shook his head to clear it, and stepped over Charlie, pointed his gun at Charlie's thigh. "And you know what? Then they'll talk to you, and after that I'll probably get a medal, because you are an idiot and you would deserve a bullet in the leg and I have been very patient, which is the only reason I didn't shoot you _this_ time. But before that we'd have to answer a lot of questions and that would be boring and so let's just avoid the whole thing. To do that, you need to take my advice. Because, and this is the important part, so listen closely." Matt took a deep breath. "If you pull this shit again, _I will shoot you._ Are we clear on this?"

Charlie grinned up at him. "Got it. No ignoring you, no chasing down bad guys, no running around with a loaded gun, no fun at all." He tilted his head and gave Matt a weird look. "Would you really shoot me? I don't think you would."

Matt didn't answer. He just walked away, cuffed the suspect, and started giving instructions to the patrolmen standing around. He ignored Reese, who was rolling her eyes and smirking at them both. He ignored the shaking in his hands, too.

*

Matt was sincere about the things that bothered him. And loud. He tended to repeat himself, and Charlie liked that. It made Matt easy to ignore when he needed to think about something else for a while.

*

Matt was not upset. He was calm. He was not not calm, which sounded like Charlie in his head and maybe pissed him off a little. But he was calm. He thought maybe if he kept saying it to himself, he'd believe it, like a mantra, which was something Charlie would say, said all the fucking _time_ even when he ought to shut the hell up, and now Matt was a little less calm. That was happening a lot lately.

"Crews. Let's talk."

Charlie started to dig in his heels. "I'm right in the middle of—"

"Look at my face. Do you see the expression on my face?"

Charlie squinted at him, and Matt tried to convey _I will kill you with my brain_ using only his expression. Charlie nodded. "Right. Talking. We should do that now. This can wait."

Matt didn't look back to see if Charlie was following him, because if he had to watch that loose-limbed stalk Charlie fell into when he was nervous or angry, Matt was going to lose his calm and they'd end up back at the beginning. He let Charlie walk in first, and then followed him into the office. Charlie leaned against the table.

Matt started out slow. "We need to talk about this."

Charlie's face was flat with stubborn reluctance. "What are we talking about?"

"You know what we're—"

"What are any of us talking about, really? Can we ever know what someone else is talking about, someone who isn't us?"

Matt counted slowly to ten.

"And really, are any of us talking to someone else? Or are we simply expressing our basic selves to the universe as we conceive it to be?"

"Crews. _Charlie_. Shut up, okay? Shut up right now, and listen to me. This isn't going to work, we need to talk about why you're running into buildings with no—"

"Usually when I have these conversations, they're with Reese, because when I run into buildings she has to run after me. She's a lot scarier than you, so I'm thinking of giving her a nickname, like I gave you a nickname, only I forgot to tell you, didn't I? I haven't told her yet, either, because I think she'd be confused. She looks confused a lot, maybe because I'm not sleeping with Reese, not that she would want me to—"

Matt froze. "Jesus, Crews, _shut up_. Do you want someone to hear you?

Charlie tilted his head. Matt could see the wheels turning, Charlie's efforts to stay with him for a minute. It was fascinating, but it was also terrifying, that he still needed to think about it so hard. After a few seconds, Charlie's focus came back. "Are we keeping it a secret that Reese doesn't want to sleep with me? Or is the secret that you are? I didn't realize we were keeping secrets."

Oh, no. ''Wait, what? Did you _tell_ people? Why would you tell people, after what happened with Emily? I told you how that ended, that it made things—just, why would you do that?"

"I told Reese when I slept with Rita from the motorcycle squad. And Ted. And Bobby. Told them, I mean. Not slept with them. Except Rita, her I slept with. Three times in the same night."

"Three times is not that impressive." Charlie quirked an eyebrow at him. Okay, it was a little impressive. Matt thought through the rest of the mess of words Charlie called a conversation, and, "Hang on. You told _Bobby_ we were fucking?"

"Well, no, I hadn't. But he's standing about six feet away. I think he heard you, so now I won't have to tell him."

"_What_?" Matt spun around, and there was Stark, leaning against the wall with an upside-down case file. "Fuck. _Fuck_, not again. Okay, nobody else. Please be a tiny bit less like you and more like a normal person and don't tell anyone else. Not even if you meet them in the street or during a case or on the internet and decide that it can't possibly come back to get us both fired."

"Does that mean I can't call you my personal pineapple?"

"Tell me you don't really call me your—yes. That's exactly what it means. Don't call me a pineapple or a banana or anything fruit related, not even as a joke. No cute nicknames, no telling people what we're doing, no grabbing my ass on the way to the interview room—"

Charlie looked like he wanted to interrupt, but Matt glared at him and he didn't. "—no making out in the supply closet anymore. No long lunches or quickies in the bathroom." Matt assumed that rattle of papers and thumping sound was Stark heading for anywhere else, probably to tell the whole department about this conversation. Fuck.

"That's a lot of rules." Sometimes Charlie was like a cat, like he could see around corners and in the dark and always land on his feet. Matt tried not to think about how that made him the mouse in this relationship. Other times, Charlie made him want to throw things. This was definitely one of the projectile moments. "I'm not sure I can remember them all without a diagram. Do we have a diagram? Maybe a flow chart or something?"

Matt didn't punch a hole in the wall, but only because it would have come out of his paycheck and Charlie wouldn't have known why it happened. He hated Charlie like this, covering with tangents and words that didn't mean anything. He hated that Charlie was still angry enough to do it to him. "Would you take this seriously for one minute? I'm trying to make sure this doesn't turn into a thing, and that means we both need to be careful."

"Can I call you my little pineapple when we're not working? Maybe when we're in the middle of—"

"Fucking _no_, Crews. I am not your personal fucking pineapple, okay? I'm just—we're just—it's not like that. It's not a nickname thing, it isn't a thing that needs a name or stupid embroidered towels, and don't even say it, no, we're not getting embroidered towels. I don't care how nice they are or that they're Egyptian cotton or that they match the upstairs bathroom, because they wouldn't be my towels, and it's not my bathroom, and I am not a mouse and _not a pineapple_, not yours or anyone else's."

Matt hesitated, because this was not the conversation he wanted. Fucking Charlie and his stupid fucking zen. "This is just a thing we do. Stop making it more than it is, because it's not, it can't be, I can't love you, okay? Don't make me do that. Don't make me, because you're going to get yourself killed. If it isn't the stunts on the job it's the other stuff, the scary stuff that we're not talking about, and one of them is going to get your head blown off and I will _not_ be the one that loses you like that."

Charlie smiled, but it didn't make it to his eyes. "So this is just a thing, like curling or Scrabble. Only, really, it's not that much like Scrabble. More like Greco-Roman wrestling."

Matt didn't storm out of the room, no matter what it looked like. He wasn't running away. He just needed to be someplace other than here for a while.

***

_along the brittle treacherous bright streets  
of memory comes my heart,singing like  
an idiot,whispering like a drunken man_

**e. e. cummings, "184"**

 

*

Charlie did what Matt asked, mostly. Sometimes he didn't, and those times Matt wouldn't look at him and wouldn't call and Charlie didn't ask why, he just asked someone else to come back to his empty house, so that he wouldn't reach out to the edges of his bed looking for anyone who wasn't close enough to touch.

*

It wasn't that Matt didn't understand what was going on. Charlie needed time to get out and be alive, to do all the stuff he missed for ten years. And so when they first started fucking—and that's all it was for a long, long time—he didn't make any noise about the way that Charlie was only half there when they weren't naked, because when he was paying attention, in those moments, it was fantastic. It was hot and loud and Matt was frequently grateful that Ted lived over the garage and not in the house, because that would have made him remember his manners and Charlie didn't want good manners in bed. Charlie seemed to want Matt stripped down, falling to pieces, and he spent a lot of time and energy making that happen.

The problem was that once they were done, Charlie slid back into his head again and Matt never knew how to get through, to get inside and stay there. He couldn't hold on when it started, not when Charlie was still out with cupcakes four or five times a week. Not even when that dropped to once a week, and then faded to the rare nights that Matt worked late, the nights he wasn't around to fill the space.

After those nights, the next time Charlie showed up leaning against the wall, the next time Matt walked to his car and they ended up in Charlie's bed, the sheets were clean and crisp. After those nights Charlie left bruises, black and hot and sharp with things they didn't ask each other. Matt could feel them when he moved. He could walk around with Charlie under his skin for weeks, and when they faded he found himself working late again.

No matter what, the strangers didn't stop completely. Matt pushed down the urge to admit that he noticed. He took what he was given.

But the desire to stay didn't go away, and Matt was all in, had been maybe since the first time, when he drove Charlie home and they ended up in the pool and he'd followed Charlie blindly over the edge into whatever this was.

He just hadn't stopped to think about what that meant. Couldn't, really, until he came so close to losing it all and realized that his ability to compartmentalize was so utterly, completely, incredibly _fucked_.

*

He couldn't resist telling Reese about the pineapple nickname. It was a good nickname, and Matt was prickly and hard to get your teeth into, but he was sweet and tasted like good things, bright with possibilities and under that, tough.

Reese didn't want to know the details of the metaphor, but that was nothing new.

*

It was funny, in a way that wasn't funny, that the fight was as much Dani's fault as the fucking had been. Matt blamed her for a lot of things. He would have called Emily to ask if that was projection or sublimation or what, but Emily didn't always answer his calls, and when she did she had a firm No Charlie rule. She hung up on him a lot, and Matt tried not to care.

Reese, though. She couldn't help talking about Charlie, because Charlie was the only thing they had in common. And she wasn't that bad at listening, as long as Matt kept it to case notes and complaints about Charlie's idiocy—she smiled at most of those, although if he got too snarky she'd glare and find something else to do—but that didn't make them friends.

It was her idea to try telling Charlie about the solitary thing. Her idea to ask Charlie to stop sleeping around. She thought maybe Charlie wouldn't mind, and that Matt needed to put up or shut up, and the worst thing was that he agreed. He didn't think it could be any harder than this.

*

Matt yelled at him when Charlie asked if he'd mind having company, even though he hadn't even met the girls yet, who were really very nice girls and said it would be fine if he brought a friend along. He yelled on the phone, and Matt was in the office, so Charlie tried to listen, he really did, because that was serious. That was Matt wanting him to be on the other end of the conversation, to stay focused, and Charlie really was getting better at this.

It was hard to follow Matt's voice when Charlie was also trying to talk to Ted, who was standing in front of him, but Charlie didn't complain. Finally Matt stopped and sighed, and in a voice that sounded broken asked Charlie to come and pick him up. Charlie hung up without answering, but he only got halfway home before he turned the car around.

Charlie didn't like endings, and so on the way to dinner he told jokes and ignored the tone of Matt's voice, the way he sat in the backseat where Charlie couldn't reach him, the slump of his shoulders and the skittering of his glance away from the mirror when Charlie tried to catch his eye.

This wasn't going to be a good moment. Charlie wondered if it could get worse.

*

Matt didn't know how to start. He never did. Sleeping with Charlie was like walking on breaking ice, waiting to slide under and lose it all. Drowning might be better than this feeling that he was keeping Charlie's head under the water just by holding on.

*

Matt ordered a bottle of wine, but he drank whiskey while they waited for dinner, one shot after another, straight with no ice. He grimaced every time, but he didn't stop until Charlie put his hand over the top of the glass, waved the waiter away. Matt picked up his wine instead, and that at least didn't make the memories crawl up Charlie's spine.

*

Matt was not drunk. He was unpleasantly buzzed, the sort of feeling that made you want to laugh or cry or throw a punch. And Charlie was sober, but that was fine. One of them needed to be sober. One of them needed to remember this.

Charlie was also being a complete shit, but Matt could understand that. He could see how scared Charlie was behind it, and that was sad and Matt wanted to fix everything but he didn't know how. He was going to make it worse, but Reese said that sometimes you had to fall all the way down before you could climb back out again. This was the hard part. The letting go, the falling. This was the part they avoided. He started with the easy things, the things they'd talked about before, but those things ran out fast.

*

Matt let him talk, and that was strange enough that Charlie kept going, kept shifting the conversation to new things, things Matt didn't know, things that required long explanations and held off whatever it was that Matt needed to be drunk to admit.

*

Matt took a deep breath and interrupted Charlie's story about an angel and a mobster and a dog cage. "We need to talk about this, this thing we're doing. Not doing. What are we doing, Charlie? I mean, what the fuck are we doing, because I did this once, and she moved to the other _coast_ to get away from me, and I don't want to have to move to Seattle or something, but I will if you ask me to do it. If you want me gone, I'll go. I want you to be happy, I really do." Charlie didn't answer. "And you, I don't know what you want. You fuck me, and then fuck all those cupcakes, and I don't know which of us is more fucked up at this point. I don't know if it matters. But this is messing me up, and it's not helping you, and I don't want to break you again. I don't want you to break."

Matt knew this was the moment, the one he'd been stepping around for months like a marked landmine. But Charlie looked so confused that he lost his nerve. And when Charlie slumped back, turned his head away and bit his lip, Matt just sighed and took another swallow of wine.

Charlie suddenly leaned forward, eyes fierce as he grabbed Matt's wrist and stood. He headed for the back, dragging Matt along with him, barely stopping to tell the startled waiter that they'd be taking their food home. He didn't slow down until they got to the bathroom, and even then he just jerked on Matt's arm, pulled Matt between himself and the door and then crowded behind him, hand on Matt's hip as he bit the back of Matt's neck, pushed against Matt's back and leaned his other arm against the door and shoved it open.

When Charlie walked forward past the mirror and then across the tile to the back stall, Matt didn't have a choice, he had to stumble in front of Charlie until they were both pressed up against the wall, with Matt's cheek against the concrete and his hands pinned between his back and Charlie.

Charlie didn't push any harder, though. He started talking, and Matt groaned a little because this was the worst possible time for Charlie to got philosophical, when Matt's dick was in possession of all his blood and his brain had shut down to a little chant of _yes, please, now, goddammit_.

Only—Matt opened his eyes after a few seconds, because Charlie's voice—he sounded so sad, and this wasn't about sex at all.

"It was so quiet at night. Silent, and the lights didn't shift or flicker, it's not like the movies. They just burn all night, so that if you open your eyes you can't tell when it is, how many minutes have passed, whether a day has gone by, or a week. There's no past, no future, just the moments piling up around you that you've already lost. All you know is when it's daytime, because the lights are the tiniest bit brighter and the screams and the shouts and the sermons and the curses start just before breakfast. You don't know what you've done or how to make it stop. No one hears you ask."

Matt didn't want to hear this. He couldn't hear this, but he couldn't move, couldn't pull away. Charlie tightened his grip. "You think about the things you'd give up, you wonder if anyone remembers where you began. And then after a while it doesn't matter why you're there. You just are, and no one knows and no one cares and it's easier to be somewhere else. I watched home movies in my head. I watched you, sometimes, sitting across from me, because you were the last one who called me Charlie."

Charlie pulled at his shoulder and Matt turned reluctantly, kept his eyes on the ceiling as Charlie knelt, slid his hands down Matt's chest to his jeans and opened them slowly. This was so messed up, even beyond the usual, and Matt put out a hand to stop Charlie but then he looked, and Charlie was on his knees and trying to explain something with that solemn look on his face. It was a look that said _truth_, only Matt couldn't read it. He didn't know what it _meant_, and so when Charlie smiled something that wasn't a smile and leaned in, Matt ignored all the words he ought to say and tried to be more like Charlie. To live in this moment, and not any of the others.

It was so much harder than it looked from the outside, and no wonder Charlie acted the way he did.

*

Charlie didn't finish his story. He thought maybe Matt could see it now, or not, but whatever happened he wanted this chance, to fix the first place they missed each other. To start again.

Maybe, Charlie hoped as he listened to Matt saying his name—like a chant, like a prayer, like a promise—maybe this time it would end differently.

*

Matt waited for the food in a daze, rattled by history he couldn't quite see, knees still loose from Charlie on the floor, mouth wrapped around Matt's dick, taking him apart. He was turning over something locked in Charlie's expression, in the way he jerked away from Matt and pulled himself together and kissed Matt, hard and bruising, before he walked out. Something about that look, the shadows on his hair—and on the sidewalk, Charlie was waiting for him, smirking, himself again. A cruiser flashed past, sirens singing, and Matt dropped the bag, because that smirk, the taste of pennies and whiskey, and he suddenly saw it. He looked at Charlie's face and Charlie knew, knew already and didn't say. Had maybe known all along.

Matt bolted for the alley and dropped into the shadows on his knees, but nothing came up and he shook his head, hard, when he felt Charlie's hand on his back. He coughed and breathed but it didn't help, couldn't stop the colors crashing together, Charlie now and Charlie then and that infirmary, the trial on the news, the wall and the tiles and Charlie on his knees.

And more, waking up hung over and finding out that they were looking for one of their own. There were the stories, the cuts Stark couldn't explain—_hands on Matt's hips_—the blood on Charlie's clothes—_mouths crashing together_—the whispers that Charlie couldn't say where he was that night.

Matt shifted to sit against the brick. When he looked up from his fists, Charlie was lit by the streetlamp, and he looked worried and resigned but not angry. He was quiet when he should be furious, should be spitting and swinging and his efforts to soothe Matt by doing none of those made it worse.

Matt looked away. "How long have you remembered it?" Charlie was silent. "The whole time?"

"I ran, too." Charlie didn't sound surprised, and that meant something, too. That was important. "That first night, I tasted blood. I didn't know how to—"

"You didn't know how to tell me. Yeah, I get that. But why here? Why this place? Why this restaurant? It was a bar back then, it doesn't even look like the same building. It doesn't look like the place, but it is, isn't it." Matt looked up, and Charlie was staring down the alley. "Have you been back since that night? Charlie. _Crews_." Charlie finally looked at him. "Why tonight?"

"I thought you were leaving, giving up. I didn't want—I don't know. I don't know, I don't know what I—it seemed like here, it might be easier. Simple. Like a circle."

That made a weird kind of sense. Matt rolled his eyes, because if Charlie made sense, they were so totally fucked. "Help me up, Charlie." Charlie didn't move. "Please."

Charlie hauled Matt up by his hand, and Matt got his balance and then pulled, startled Charlie into landing with his palms flat against the wall on either side of Matt's head. They stood like that, breathing each other's air, close enough to touch but not, until Charlie leaned in and closed his eyes.

*

Standing outside the restaurant, Matt looked empty, lost, like Charlie had taken faith and thrown it in his face. This was worse than he expected. It was like—Charlie didn't know what it was like. He had no idea what Matt was thinking, where he'd gone.

This must be how other people felt around him. Charlie really would have to start apologizing and meaning it.

Later, he couldn't remember what he said, what he did to go from staring at Matt over a dark sidewalk and the remains of their dinner, to Matt, against the wall, staring at Charlie as if he had some sort of answer. As if he held forgiveness, absolution, release.

He didn't think there was a good koan for this situation, and so Charlie did the only thing he could think of—he provided a distraction.

*

He didn't turn his head away, didn't reject what Charlie offered. Matt wanted to go, knew he needed to back away, knew that this was the sort of problem that wouldn't vanish if they pretended it didn't exist. He knew that the absolute last thing they should be doing was this.

But it was Charlie kissing him, and Matt—Matt had been hurting Charlie, one way or another, since the very first night. No matter what he did, Charlie was going to get hurt, so Matt leaned into Charlie, put everything he regretted and all the secrets he still kept into kissing Charlie. And when Charlie dropped his arms, stood there with their mouths the only point of contact, something Matt had been holding tight crumbled.

*

Charlie couldn't take the next step. All he could do was wait, and follow Matt to the next moment.

*

He didn't—it wasn't about all the times Charlie walked away. It was about bruises, reminders of how close they managed to get. It was about Charlie, thirteen years before, no marks to tell him that Matt was real, no napkin with a phone number in his pocket or name or, fuck, Matt's badge number if that would have helped. It was about stitches and scars, the rough places that made Charlie flinch when Matt dragged calluses over nerves long dead. It was about hiding in plain sight, bright colors over old hurts, conversations that skidded like rocks on a lake. It was about all those months, when Matt was trying to get through, to find a way inside, to understand all the things that Charlie didn't say. It was about Charlie coming to terms with the place it all started and leaving Matt behind.

It was about, just once, getting into Charlie the way that Charlie got into him.

Matt didn't know what it was really about, which was the thought that tipped the balance. All he knew was that Charlie was standing there, waiting, and they were spinning further and further away from each other. If he didn't reach now, it would be like pushing Charlie away. And Matt wasn't strong enough to do that.

So he stepped forward, and he turned Charlie around and he pushed, pushed until they were both hidden in the shadows, until Charlie's expensive jacket was snagged against the building and Matt was pressed up against him, pushing into his space, holding them together. Until Charlie couldn't possibly mistake his intent.

*

He agreed. Charlie kept telling himself that, repeated it until it didn't mean anything, as Matt pushed into him and Charlie closed his eyes and held himself still and waited for the next moment. He agreed, Charlie wanted this, he practically _asked_ for Matt to cross this line. If Matt hadn't, Charlie might have dragged them into this place and Matt knew what they needed. Charlie could stop him with a gesture and he wanted to keep Matt, keep what they shared, so he didn't.

But in his head there were cell doors clanging and the smell of disinfectant and Charlie wasn't in this moment, with Matt whispering encouragement and his name and things that weren't even words. Charlie was in other moments, other places, other rough walls and times when there wasn't gentleness, when there wasn't Matt, when he hadn't agreed. It was those moments that made him bare his teeth and squirm away from his body, even if it was this one, this alley and knowing that Matt wanted this, needed this, that kept him from saying anything out loud.

*

The next morning, Matt woke up and Charlie was gone already. He didn't say goodbye, or wake Matt up, and Matt knew when he went home with Charlie that he'd messed up but he didn't know how. Charlie told him it was nothing.

It was never nothing. Not once. It wasn't nothing and Matt didn't know what it was, but he also knew there was no point in asking again. Charlie would talk when he was ready. Matt wanted to push, because he had been hanging onto this thing, whatever this thing was, for a decade now, and he really did think they had gotten somewhere when Charlie finally let him in. He didn't.

So he woke up late and showered fast and put on the clothes Charlie bought and left in an empty drawer for mornings like this, and he called a cab and went to work. He expected Charlie to show up for lunch, and when he didn't, for him to call before his shift ended, but the phone didn't ring. And maybe Charlie was on a major case and had forgotten to call, or maybe he was distracted by a sale on blood oranges or something equally stupid. Maybe he wasn't.

*

Matt looked so quiet, asleep and relaxed and like he belonged in Charlie's bed. Charlie didn't get up for a long time, but when he did, he tried to be quiet, too.

*

Matt didn't believe his own reassurances, but he still gave it another day before he started to really worry. By then, he had left messages with Ted and with Davis and with Stark, even, because he was calling and calling and Charlie wouldn't pick up his phone, not his cell phone or his desk phone or his home phone. Matt kept trying, and eventually he called Reese instead because wherever Reese was, Charlie wouldn't be far away.

And he got Charlie on the phone, but the conversation was just _impossible_ because Charlie was in the middle of the squad room and Matt wasn't even on a closed channel, that's how frustrating the whole thing was, how much it wasn't fucking _working_. Charlie acted like a flippant bastard, all cryptic responses and stupid jokes when he knew that Matt would be freaking out, and Matt yelled a couple of things that he probably shouldn't have about pineapples and alleys and _manipulative assholes who refused to answer the phone_, and then hung up.

He tried again later, when he could call from his own phone. By then, not only was Charlie not answering, but Reese called him an idiot and slammed the phone down, and Matt really wanted to shoot himself in the head or get very, very drunk.

*

It wasn't Matt's fault. None of it was really Matt's fault, because Matt was trying and he just didn't know anything about anything. But that didn't make it any easier for Charlie to look him in the eye. It took a few days for him to stand next to Matt without wanting to flinch, or punch, or grab Matt and shove him up against the nearest wall and kiss him breathless.

Once he knew he could walk away, Charlie called Matt back. By then, Matt had decided he didn't care what was wrong. He didn't ask, and Charlie left it alone. Left Matt alone, as much as he could.

*

A couple of months back on his regular assignments almost made Matt forget how infuriating Charlie could be.

Matt was fine, eight hours into a negotiation and he was about to start getting somewhere. Cheryl kept waving at him, trying to get him to take a break. He glared at her, took a cup of coffee Charlie handed him, and kept talking.

Sometime in hour twelve, Charlie pulled his hand off the back of Matt's neck, where he'd been using his fingers to hold Matt together. He'd been standing beside Matt, fingers on Matt's pulse, his thumb making slow circles while Matt did his job, but then Charlie squeezed and leaned down and whispered in his ear about checking with tactical. Matt grabbed his arm, because tactical didn't need Charlie like he did just then, and it was the first time in weeks that he felt like Charlie was really in the room with him.

It was all quick glances and bumped shoulders in hallways, one of them heading out on a case as the other headed home. Beyond some awkward conversations, there'd been almost nothing at all since Charlie stopped answering Matt's calls.

Matt had hoped it was coincidence until Reese bitched about being switched to the graveyard shift. That made him nervous. But Charlie was here with him today, had been all day long. He was here watching Matt talk to a suspect, some guy Charlie followed across town who locked himself in a diner while waving a gun. Charlie was here, focused on this, and they'd think about the rest later. Right now Matt was busy doing his job and being grateful that they were in the same place for a few hours. That he could see Charlie, and know he was safe. That Charlie was standing right here.

And then Charlie pulled away, and Matt tried to hold on but Charlie slid his fingers out of Matt's grasp and bent down, pressed their foreheads together. Matt let his eyes close for a second and Charlie was gone. He leaned his head onto his arms and took a deep breath.

He was still talking, still listening, still breathing, but waiting for Charlie to come back.

*

Sometimes Charlie didn't think things through. Matt called it a major character flaw. Reese called it a lot of other things, none of them polite. Charlie could see their point just now.

He had decided that Matt looked exhausted, and that he wasn't getting anywhere, and Charlie could make that stop, if he went and talked to the guy with the gun. The first step was easy to think about, but the ones after that—Charlie hadn't exactly considered them before he stripped out of his vest and dropped his gun and walked into the diner with his hands up.

Not thinking was what got him caught up in this moment, the moment where he stared down the barrel of a gun and the HT—Matt's language was full of interesting abbreviations—said Charlie's name. Not thinking got him here to this place, to closing his eyes and waiting and breathing, as over his earpiece he listened to Matt's voice crack and stutter and be replaced by Cheryl, who didn't sound pleased to know that Charlie was about to be not alive.

*

The next few minutes were sharp, bright like a knife, like a kick to the chest. One second he was rummaging for something, anything, to say. The next the HT was letting everyone go, and Matt—it was unexpected, there was nothing Matt had done to make that happen. Someone else had moved the ball, and he sat up and gestured frantically for Cheryl, covered his microphone and muttered, "What the hell is going on?"

Frank was standing a few feet away, and oh, that was not a good look. That was the look Frank got when someone messed up a perfectly good plan, and Matt hadn't done anything wrong, he was sure he hadn't. The only other reason Frank would look at Matt like that was—" Detective Charlie Crews."

Matt's attention snapped back to his earpiece. "What? What was that?"

The HT sounded pleased with himself. "I said, I've agreed to exchange the hostages for Mr. Crews. He'll stay with me, and everyone else can go home."

Matt didn't know what he said, but Cheryl snapped off his feed and grabbed a phone and started talking, which was fine with Matt because he was already running, headed for the door until he slammed into Frank and landed on his ass, glaring up and scrambling to get his feet under himself to get out there, get to Charlie.

Frank punched him in the nose, and Matt probably deserved it because he'd said a few rude things about Frank's mother on his way up off the floor.

*

Charlie listened to Cheryl, who was really very good at Matt's job, as good as Matt was, and he waited for things to turn out the way they should end. If that meant he had made a mistake in interfering, at least Matt wasn't responsible for whatever happened next.

*

They didn't even give him a phone, not until he started pounding at the door of the office where Frank had shoved him. Matt had to shout, he shouted a lot and he did it as loudly as he could, shouted any words that might work, might get him back out and to Charlie, to where he could do _something_, anything, to fix this.

Even then it was another five minutes before Frank reappeared with a headset that had been broken open to remove the microphone.

Matt took what he could get. And then he spent sixty-three minutes listening to Cheryl bargain for Charlie, her voice steady and calm as Matt paced between desks, yelled things that no one could hear. He paced until Frank opened the door and threatened to tape his mouth shut and tie him to a chair if he didn't stop throwing things against the windows.

Matt settled into leaning against the wall, watching his knuckles turn white and concentrating on the sound of Cheryl's voice, the sharp heat of his nails digging into his palms, the hum of all the things that he wanted to be doing a steady buzz under his skin.

When Frank unlocked the office after seventy-nine minutes, Matt didn't bother to say he was sorry, just took off for the street and headed for the flash of Charlie's hair, down the block and outside the cordon.

*

Charlie though it turned out rather well, until he saw the look on Matt's face. This was probably not a good time to mention that they'd both be getting citations. Matt stopped a few feet away, and Charlie waited.

"Are you out of your fucking _mind_? You utter jackass, you could have gotten yourself _killed_."

Yes. This was definitely not a good time.

*

Charlie just looked at him, and Matt could tell that he wanted praise of some sort, and Matt was just. Done. He was done telling Charlie that it was okay, and that they'd be fine, and that everything would work out. He was tired of being careful and quiet and always measuring his words, because that wasn't how he was, and it wasn't how Charlie was, and this thing, this whole thing that had started to fall apart in that alley when Matt did whatever he'd done to break them open, was too much. It was too raw and too sharp and the though of Charlie walking in front of a gun made Matt furious and terrified and actually made him take a swing at _Frank_, for fuck's sake, which was possibly the most suicidal thing he'd ever done. He was going insane and it was Charlie's fault and he didn't know how to make it stop.

He wanted, more than anything, ever, to take two steps and drag Charlie close and map him out, an inch at a time, until all he could see and taste and feel was that Charlie was still here, still alive, still in this place and this time and still with him. He wanted it, and this time he took it, walked forward and ran his thumbs over Charlie's face, kissed him like it was the last time, the first time, all the times in between. But as he did, as Charlie leaned into him and Matt made sure they were both still alive, all he kept thinking was that one of these times, maybe the next one, it really would be the last. He wouldn't see it coming because he could never, ever see what Charlie was going to do before he _did_ it.

And so Matt stepped back, stepped out of reach, and started talking. He said everything, all of it, from the first meeting in the infirmary, when he'd ignored the tug of hesitation, to the way he'd wanted to run his fingers over Charlie's healing black eye in that interview room, to the helplessness of Charlie, lying in an infirmary bed again, unconscious because Matt had asked the impossible.

He tried to say it all, to explain the reasons and the ache of walking away and all the things that he couldn't do, the ways that he couldn't help. The days that he felt the ground shifting beneath his feet, how every time he closed his eyes he saw the walls of the prison closing in on Charlie.

When Matt started talking about the phone calls and the promises and the only thing he knew to do, the only way to keep Charlie safe, the look on Charlie's face made the world go silent. Matt stopped there, before the end, before the moment he crumpled that first note in his hand.

And when Charlie walked away, didn't look back, Matt knew, just a little bit, how that door into solitary must have felt.

*

That night, well after midnight, Matt stood outside the door and knocked for an hour and forty-eight minutes. The phone rang every two minutes. Ted didn't say anything, just stopped for a few seconds, looked uncertain, and then went to bed without saying goodnight.

Charlie stood in his empty living room and marked time by the way that Matt's voice grew ragged and faded away. Charlie fell asleep leaning against the door.

The next morning, he slipped out the back door and past the fence that wasn't there. He let the car roll silently down the driveway and started it in the street where it wouldn't wake anyone on his front porch, and Ted called at lunch to tell him that Matt had gone home soon after that.

The next night, when he knocked on Matt's front door, because the key was in his pocket but Matt should have the choice, should be able to decide whether he was ready to let Charlie in, no one answered and the windows were dark. Charlie didn't leave a note.

***

_Beneath the blue oblivious sky, the water  
sings of nothing, not your name, not mine._

**Don Paterson, "Poetry"**

*

Three weeks later, they worked a case together because no one asked Matt if it was a good idea to assign them to the same place and time and presumably no one asked Charlie, either. But who knew with Charlie, maybe he thought it was a _great_ idea.

Matt didn't know where to start untangling that mess, so when Dani and Charlie walked up he found something else to worry about. Frank let him hang around for a few minutes, and by the time he set up some equipment and checked in with Leah and double-checked all the things he'd already checked twice, he was ready to face it, ready to look them in the eye, ready for Charlie. Who had by then wandered off to do whatever he'd been brought in to do. Chase people and get in the way of punches and knives while making absolutely no sense, presumably.

It was what Charlie did best.

*

The first case was difficult. Charlie didn't quite manage to be zen, but he did manage not to throw anything at Matt. It was progress.

The second case was just as complicated, but Charlie just used his ability to free associate, the one that drove Matt crazy. By the end it was starting to be a little fun, saying things and watching Matt try not to react. It was more fun than watching Matt turn his back and walk away. Charlie kept pushing.

*

Matt worked the case. Charlie did—something. It seemed to involve walking around and asking distracting questions, like _do you all get neat headsets_ and saying distracting things, like _I thought there would be more gunfire and shouting_ and just being a pain in the ass in general. He considered the possibility that Charlie was actually _only_ there to drive Matt insane, but that seemed petty. While Matt wouldn't put it past Charlie, he wasn't ready to admit that the LAPD, the FBI, or the universe wanted to see him crack up over this.

*

Charlie assumed that taking enjoyment from Matt's discomfort made him a smaller person, but he didn't stop doing it. Yet.

*

On the third case—and the third time was _not_ the charm, whoever said that was misguided and mistaken and just wrong in uncountable ways—in between wishing that he were somewhere else, maybe getting shot at or jumping out of a perfectly good airplane or sitting in a snowdrift slowly freezing to death, Matt caught himself missing Charlie.

Mostly he missed Charlie's annoying quirks, and that was a little scary. That he didn't miss the sex—well, maybe he did a little—but he missed the way that Charlie would turn his head, or walk into a room, or lean against a wall with his shoulders tilted and his hips bowed out while he asked a favor.

He missed Charlie waking him up because he was craving papaya in the middle of the night, dragging Matt downstairs to eat pieces of whatever fruit was around, cutting them into chunks and smearing the juice everywhere when he got distracted by Matt's mouth. He missed Ted clearing his throat and pointedly not looking at anything or anyone when he found them there in the morning, curled up on the floor under a blanket, sticky and messy and not really as sorry as they should have been.

He missed opening his eyes to Charlie's fingers on his skin, Charlie's mouth drifting across his shoulder, Charlie's voice in his ear asking about coffee or breakfast or the box scores from the Cubs game because he was stubborn and didn't follow the home team. He missed Charlie's face, smashed against the pillow, and his eyes blinking open as the sun hit the bed and turned his hair flame-bright. He missed Charlie holding him down as he told Matt all the things he was about to do before he did them, and Charlie's skin, slick with soap and hot water, the times that they'd set the alarm early to have time to fuck in the shower.

Matt missed the sex more than a little, if he was honest. But that wasn't all he missed, it wasn't everything. The sex was just the easiest thing to name. And it was definitely not something he ought to be remembering in the middle of a case.

Which was why it was a problem when Charlie showed up, looking like he'd just tumbled out of bed and wearing a t-shirt that was perfectly respectable but that looked almost obscene as a replacement for his usual oxford button-downs and careful ties. The sex was the reason that Matt took one look at Charlie and found somewhere else to be.

The universe hated Matt. It was the only explanation that made any sense. Either that, or Charlie hated Matt, and he'd really prefer that it was the universe, because that seemed less likely to kill him by inches, wanting things he couldn't keep.

*

The wet hair was an accident, and he had a shirt in the car but it was hot already and getting hotter and Charlie couldn't bring himself to put it on.

Besides, part of his efforts to be less angry involved talking to someone impartial. Reese had sent him a list of names and a threat to staple his mouth shut if he said one more thing about Matt's hands or his jaw or the way he looked after Charlie caught him by surprise, found Matt making dinner for them both. Reese bought a bright red stapler and Charlie caught her looking at it sometimes as if she were trying to decide how much damage it would cause.

The therapist said that he needed to relax the way he approached the world.

So Charlie wore a t-shirt to work, and when he saw Matt flinch and walk away and drift back like a comet, furious at the insistence of gravity, he got an even better idea than random conversational gambits.

*

Matt spent a lot of his time avoiding Charlie. It was juvenile but he didn't care, because Charlie was Charlie and it was either avoid him or strangle him. Matt didn't want to go to jail.

He just wanted Charlie to leave him alone. It didn't seem like too much to ask, because Matt honestly couldn't figure out why Charlie was still around in the first place. He'd made it clear that they were done, that Matt's good intentions weren't enough to get him anywhere, and so whenever Matt saw him at a scene he twitched and questioned himself and spent half of his time trying to pretend that watching Charlie didn't make him miserable.

It worked, but only barely. In that it didn't work at all, but Matt tried not to think about it when he could remember not to think.

*

Charlie didn't have much experience with breaking up with someone, but he suspected this wasn't how it usually worked. Charlie had walked away, and so this was backwards. Wasn't Matt the one who was meant to be working to fix the mess? Matt who should be trying to find out what had gone wrong, where it could be put right?

Reese got a shifty look on her face whenever he brought up Matt's confession, and Charlie didn't look too closely at that. One more example of a moment he had missed, if he was the last to know what happened. If there was more that he couldn't see.

For the first time, it occurred to Charlie that life would be simpler if people came with handbooks, like jobs and purchases. His refrigerator had a 418 page manual with color diagrams and a set of phone numbers, but when it came to Matt, Charlie was on his own. That seemed like the wrong way around.

*

Distance sucked. Distance only worked when someone moved 3000 miles away, or when they were behind bars, or when they were dead. Charlie was none of those things, and Matt found himself reaching for the phone too often. Charlie was still close enough that Matt could bring him back, ask him to be closer than a phone call, and it was tempting.

He kept punching in the number, one digit at a time, because he'd taken Charlie out of the speed dial after the second week. Trying to talk himself out of it—sometimes it worked, and he never dialed that last number. Sometimes it didn't, and he heard Charlie answer before he got the nerve to hang up.

He was pretty sure that when Dani had told him to keep in touch, to listen to Charlie even when he didn't say anything, she hadn't meant this.

*

It should have felt more like a victory, to find Hollis. And it was. It was a victory.

Charlie still felt a little lost.

*

Matt wasn't there when Charlie brought in the actual murderer. But he talked to Reese afterwards, about the look on Charlie's face. She didn't sound any more certain than Matt that the whole thing was over.

The day that Charlie Crews walked away before something was finished? Probably the day he stopped being Charlie. The day he stopped being the man Matt had fallen—whatever, this wasn't that day.

*

He started following Matt to work in the mornings, which was probably a bad idea, but it was the only way to see him without actually talking to him. Charlie didn't want to talk to Matt.

Charlie didn't know what would happen next or if he'd ever be ready to talk to Matt, but he couldn't sleep at night without knowing that Matt was somewhere in the city, still walking around and being alive. Without knowing that there was still time. Charlie could be annoyed at him from across the city, but when he could see Matt standing in front of him, all he felt was sad.

No. His new therapist, the third one since he started, because they kept giving him funny looks and sending him to different specialists when he asked questions, said it was important to always be honest inside yourself. Especially when it was useful to lie to everyone else. That was good advice.

The truth was that he was furious. But he wasn't sure how much that truth mattered, because the more he thought about it, the harder it was to keep hold of the anger. Matt wasn't Charlie's father, wasn't Hollis, and he hadn't done anything deliberately. He'd been trying to help, and that would count for something eventually. Not yet, but maybe someday.

The random phone calls, he decided, were Matt's way of making up for all the times he hadn't talked about what happened to them. He always picked up, because eventually—one of these times—Matt was going to say something true. Charlie was teaching himself to listen.

*

Reese, of all people, started sending him emails. Matt tried to trash them without reading, but after a few weeks of that she added subject lines, like, _I know you're not reading this but I think Charlie is going insane and taking the new LT with him_, and _Charlie had to shoot holes in his new car and he didn't mention you until three hours later but he was thinking about it all fucking day_, and eventually _if I have to create a hostage situation to get him to stop talking about second chances and fate I will do that, don't think I won't_.

That was the one that Matt ended up reading. It wasn't that he wanted to know what was going on. It was just that eventually she'd get bored with being subtle and he'd end up locked in a vault with Charlie until they both gave in to her demands. Replying was less painful than pissing her off, and probably wouldn't involve maiming or Buddhist parables.

When Charlie started going to therapy and seemed to mean it, instead of going solely to drive every therapist he met to drink, Reese sent a note on actual paper. The note said that if Crews didn't stop practicing his externalization of emotion on stakeouts she was going to push him off a bridge, but Matt could read the relief between the lines.

*

Therapy was interesting. That was all Charlie could say for it. It was interesting, much like the way that chasing Jennifer was interesting. It gave him something else to think about. Something that wasn't Matt and wasn't solitary and wasn't the connections between Matt and solitary that Charlie wasn't thinking about.

He was getting really tired of everything being connected, actually. He needed a pair of scissors, or maybe a knife, to start disconnecting all the pieces of things that weren't important from the ones that were. Maybe his new therapist could help with that.

Learning to wait for Reese before he went in shooting, that was useful. That was something he really ought to thank Matt for, someday. The therapist told him it was too soon for that.

*

Five partners in three months turned out to be some sort of record. Cheryl pulled him off primary, which Matt had to admit was probably a good idea. Agreeing with the decision didn't make it any easier to hear.

He was trying to believe that putting him on call to coordinate with the locals had nothing to do with Charlie, but Cheryl was pretty bad at matchmaking. She kept telling him to wear something nice, but only on the days that Charlie happened to show up at the scene. There was no way she was worried about the dress code, and Matt spent a lot of time trying to decide where she was getting her information.

*

Charlie didn't think about it. No more than necessary, which was only every time he saw Matt, or a leather jacket, or a firing range, or a suspect, or a pair of faded jeans, or a phone that didn't ring. It turned out that necessary was a lot of the time. Most of the time.

But he'd learned one thing from prison, and that was never to let anyone see that he noticed what they were doing wrong. That was a good way to end up the sort of witness who couldn't say anything ever again, and Matt wouldn't do that, Charlie knew he wouldn't, but there were other bad things that could happen.

So Charlie tried to ignore the realities that Matt refused to accept, and hoped that one of them would be hit by a revelation.

*

The bust turned into a fiasco, and Matt would have gone home and gotten drunk and called it a day but they still had a kidnapping to solve and that meant he was on duty until something broke.

When he got back to the office, Charlie was sitting at Emily's old desk. Matt was starting to think that the something broken would be him.

Charlie was really not a person Matt was mentally equipped to deal with, not today. And yet here he was. "Hey, Matt, you came back. They weren't sure you'd be back until tomorrow." Matt ignored him, the way you were supposed to ignore a delusion. "I thought you would be, because where else would you go, but it's good to see that I guessed right. Reese owes me ten dollars."

"I work here, Crews." Matt turned back to his computer, but when Charlie didn't respond, he looked up and Charlie was standing a few feet away, watching him. Charlie didn't say anything, just ran his tongue under his lip and gave a look that made promises, one that meant he was waiting for Matt to take him up on an offer. And that wasn't fair, that was _not fair_, that was playing dirty. That was—they didn't do that on the job. They didn't do that anywhere, not anymore, not in just under eleven weeks, and Matt didn't have time to think about this. "Charlie, what do you want? Because I can't do this now, I have a case. We have a case that we're supposed to be working on. Why are you here, instead of working to find that third suspect?"

"This is my job. We're talking about the case, and that's part of my job. The other part is about going out and catching criminals. You know, the way that I got our guy, and yours drove off in a station wagon. I heard all about that, how you let him drive right past. Losing your touch a little?"

There just was never any way to make him—Matt was too tired to do this now, whatever it was. He didn't have the energy to deal with Charlie and conversational games. "Yeah. You know what, you're right, I didn't shoot out his tires or throw myself in front of the car or jump out a fucking window to catch him. It's all my fault, right? It's always my fault, and I'm sorry, okay, I'm always sorry, so now can we get back to work? Isn't your _job_ somewhere else, at your own station? Don't you have people to question or witnesses to frighten or something? I swear, you're around more than the Eppes kid."

Charlie blinked. "I didn't say it was your—"

"And you know what? Fuck you. You didn't _get_ your guy, you shot him and not even in the leg or the arm or something, you shot him in the _chest_ and now he's not in custody, he's dead. You killed your guy, and my guy got away, yeah, but whatever. We can't talk to either of them, and that means we're nowhere on this case. And it's as much your fault as mine. So fuck off, okay? I have work to do. I can't believe you fucking shot the guy we needed to interview instead of talking to him."

"Yeah, I did." Charlie never knew when to _shut up_. "What did you want me to try instead? Last time I talked to a guy pointing a gun at my head, you said you couldn't—he shot at me, Matt, and you would have done the same thing. He fired a shotgun at us, and we returned fire, and what else was I supposed to do?"

Matt grabbed his files and walked out. He didn't look back. Charlie was still talking when he got on the elevator, but Matt watched the doors close and then leaned against the wall, waiting for his heart to stop racing.

*

Revelations took time. Or maybe he was doing something else wrong. There _really_ ought to be a manual. A flowchart, anything that would map out how this was supposed to go. They were supposed to talk, and then Charlie could stop being angry and Matt would be—Matt would be Matt again. Matt would be Charlie's again.

The more he walked around on his own, the harder it became to let people go. There was a lesson in that. Somewhere.

*

Matt hated this case. This was the case that never _ended_, the case that just kept throwing him together with Charlie because every time they thought it was done something else went wrong. This was the case that was going to drive Matt over the edge into insanity.

And right now, at this moment, this case was—humiliating, mostly, because he had never been any good at undercover work, that was how Matt ended up as a negotiator in the first place. He was really great at being himself, and at carefully convincing other people to do what they needed to do. And sometimes he was good at yelling at people who didn't listen, but this? This was not something that Matt had any talent for. He was terrible at pretending to be someone else, he always had been.

Plus there was a polyester vest involved. And, as if that weren't bad enough, he couldn't even be humiliated in peace, he had to do it in front of Frank and Duff and the rest of the team, who were having _way_ too much fun with the whole thing.

*

He was just checking in, making sure that things were going the way they should. That Matt was still walking around, now that Charlie had been politely banned from the FBI offices until further notice and for no reason that made any sense. He was pretty sure that Frank was lying, and _because my supervisor said so_ wasn't really in the handbook above _bioterrorism_ and _breakfast pastries, lack thereof_. He wasn't completely sure, because if there was actually such a rule Frank refused to let him read it. And then he escorted Charlie out.

Reese thought it was a good idea to stop in, although she had a smile on her face when she suggested it and Charlie maybe ought not to trust her when looked like that. Plus he checked the log on her phone, and she'd been talking to Frank over lunch. Frank rarely had the sort of ideas that ended without a hospital visit.

Still. He had mostly good intentions. Was it his fault that Matt couldn't see that?

*

Oh, for the love of— "Crews. Reese. Are you here for a reason, or did Frank pay you? Whatever he gave you, I'll pay double if you turn around and walk back out without saying a word."

Charlie ignored him, which was what usually happened. "Matt. How are you? We just thought we'd stop by, see if you needed any backup. Since you're not working with a partner these days."

"That's really not your problem. It's not a problem at all, but if it was, it wouldn't be your problem. It would be my problem, or maybe my partner's, but I don't have a partner. So we've got no problem, my imaginary partner and I. And you can go."

"I didn't say it was my problem, or that it was a problem, or—look, it was a question. Conversations start with a question, this is a conversation. I'm saying hello, asking how you are. It's what friends do, isn't it?"

Charlie stirred his tea and Matt tried not to watch. "Is that what we are? Because I didn't get that memo. And Dani, you know I like you and we should really go for an orange juice and catch up once I'm done with this, but could you please take him somewhere else? Just for a few days or months or years. Find somewhere sunny, with pineapple trees."

Dani looked like she always did, like she was faintly amused and irritated with herself for finding anything Charlie did funny. "I don't like pineapple. You've got me confused with Charlie. He has terrible taste in fruit." Matt wanted to throw a plastic basket at her head.

Charlie didn't even bother to look insulted. "Pineapples don't grow on trees. It's a simple question, Matt. How are you? Tell me you're doing fine, that you're okay, that you love your job and your life and you're maybe thinking of taking up knitting. Tell me you'll make me a scarf and a pair of mittens. Give me something."

Matt tried again. "Reese. Come on, he's got all that money and he barely uses it. Beaches, pool boys, grass skirts. You could convince him to wear a grass skirt, you know you could. And then when I've died peacefully in a nice shootout, he can come back and harass my corpse—"

That hit a nerve, because Charlie actually interrupted. "I don't like the beach, I end up with sand in my shoes and it never really goes away, I have to buy new shoes to get rid of it, and I never know what to do with the old ones. I don't want new shoes, Matt." He tilted his head and stepped closer. "We can go to the beach, though. All you have to do is ask. Ask me for something."

Matt looked away. "Go to hell, Charlie. I'm trying to work."

*

Charlie called Cheryl a few times, but she was a little scary and never told him anything useful. Frank was a better contact, because Frank thought the whole thing was hilarious and told Charlie about Matt's refusal to get a new partner and his sudden interest in the firing range and the many ways in which Matt told everyone to fuck off when they tried to get him to go out or eat lunch or talk to anyone but Emily.

Charlie wanted to call Emily, to either ask her some questions or offer whatever she wanted to stop taking Matt away, but Reese wouldn't give him the number. She said that some things were too stupid even for him, and that if she found out he'd called she would tune the radio station in his car to that Steele show and then throw the tuner out the window on the freeway.

*

Matt didn't know which was worse, that Cheryl had stopped trying to get him to talk about it, or that Frank hadn't.

*

He called Constance. He probably should have called Constance in the first place; she was the only one who knew what he needed to hear, what Matt hadn't said. Constance knew what Charlie had been too surprised to consider, when she showed up at Pelican Bay and called him by his name.

Charlie finally asked who told her what to call him in the first place, and Constance answered. When he stopped to think, Charlie decided that his failure to ask the question was what started it all. Of course Matt was angry. Charlie had never thought to find out what happened first, had forgotten that moments went in two directions—both forwards and backwards. Without knowing what had already happened, how could they ever come to what was next?

*

Matt was doing just fine without Charlie. He was avoiding, and avoiding was the first step to repressing, and repressing was just like being perfectly stable and functional if nobody looked too carefully. If he wasn't quite fine, he was definitely getting there.

He would get there. Eventually. As long as the phone didn't ring.

*

He didn't call Matt, because he wasn't sure that Matt would answer. But he let Matt get a head start and then showed up on his doorstep.

He thought about standing on the front lawn with a stereo, but that was probably going too far.

*

Matt didn't know why he answered the door. He wasn't expecting Charlie on the other side of it, but that didn't matter because deep down he had been expecting Charlie to show up for weeks, months, forever. He expected it so much that sometimes he convinced himself that he saw Charlie's car, half a block back at a stoplight, or parked at the high school down the street when he headed to work in the morning.

Matt was imagining Charlie in his life so much that he was hallucinating.

He'd seen Charlie coming to find him so many times that when he finally did, standing on the doorstep in the rain—and it never rained in LA, so what was up with that—Matt let him in. It turned out that Charlie wasn't the only one who could do completely idiotic things sometimes.

*

Next time Charlie decided to make a grand gesture, he was going to bring flowers or chocolate or maybe a speech. He could write a poem, or sing a song. Maybe Matt would appreciate interpretive dance. He'd check the weather first, at least, because wet wool was not in the original plan and didn't add anything to the overall effect.

But that was next time, and this time all he had was himself. Still, that's what he brought, and it must have been enough because Matt opened the door and stepped aside and when Charlie walked in, moved closer until they were inches apart, Matt didn't flinch or back away or do anything but close his eyes.

And so Charlie did the only thing he could. He jumped off a cliff, and he tried not to care if it worked.

*

Matt braced himself for a punch, but it never came. In a way, Charlie's kissing him was worse. Harder to explain, or to defend, or to ask questions about afterwards. A punch would have been an ending, a place to stop. This was—something else entirely.

*

Matt didn't push him away, so Charlie smiled and wrapped his hands around Matt's elbows and pushed Matt backwards through the living room and into the bedroom.

Matt's bed was obvious from the front door, you could see it waiting there and Charlie thought that was an excellent idea. It took away the fun of chasing Matt up the stairs, but it had the added appeal of making the distance a lot shorter, which meant that it took less than half as long for him to get there and start kissing Matt again.

He briefly considered kissing Matt _while_ he pushed him, but he didn't know where anything was when he closed his eyes, and that would probably end with one of them sprawled on the floor.

Concussions were never a good way to apologize. Sex, though. Sex was an excellent method. There were lots of things you could say with sex.

*

Matt couldn't find his footing, didn't know what Charlie wanted, so he went with what he knew—he played along until somebody tipped a hand. He moved when Charlie pushed, and followed along with Charlie's efforts to strip him—slowly, and that was new, that was different, that made Matt wonder if this was a goodbye after all, even if it wasn't a punch to the face—and he eventually just did his best to be whatever Charlie was looking for, whatever he needed. If Matt couldn't fix Charlie—and he couldn't, he'd given up trying, because it was just too much—he could at least not make it any harder for Charlie to fix himself.

Of course, with his luck, this was probably some sort of defense mechanism or backsliding, and being here tonight would set Charlie back months and years and he'd end up prison-crazy again, all because Matt couldn't make himself close the door when Charlie showed up to find him. All because Matt didn't know how to hang on to his anger when Charlie asked him for more.

*

Charlie didn't actually know how to apologize with sex. He knew how to convince someone to agree with a ridiculous plan, and he knew how to say goodbye, and he knew how to accept an apology and banish a memory.

But he didn't know how to tell Matt that it wasn't his fault, it was Charlie's. Or maybe they were both wrong, but that was even harder to say without stopping what they were doing—and what they were doing was much, much too good to stop, because Matt did this thing with his tongue that—talking was for later. They could talk later. After.

*

There were times when Matt really wished he could turn his thoughts off. If he could be just a little more like Charlie, letting the thoughts come and then ignoring them, this would probably be a lot easier. This wouldn't feel like a lie, when every time he arched into Charlie a voice of reason asked how many more times he would feel this, would see Charlie like this, asked how much time they still had.

*

Matt was right. Three times wasn't that impressive. It was more of a sliding scale.

He couldn't work out how to apologize with sex, but Charlie had been listening in therapy and the first thing to do was be in the room. So he stayed the night, and when the sunrise came in through the window he was already awake, watching Matt sleeping, calm and happy and maybe, finally, ready to do something permanent with someone. With Charlie.

And then the phone rang and Reese had a case, so he said goodbye to Matt, promised to make it up to him. Matt muttered about alarm clocks and Charlie left him there, falling back to sleep as if he'd never been awake.

*

When he woke up the next morning, bed empty and Charlie long gone, Matt wished that he'd asked for more, something different. He wanted touches that left a mark, and instead he got Charlie offering something that felt like romance. They didn't do romance, Matt didn't know what to do with romance instead of violence. It was like a bait and switch, the two of them pretending to be more than they knew.

It wasn't real, and Matt didn't think too hard about when, exactly, he became the sort of person who thought that the only real things were the ones that hurt.

*

Charlie kept trying. Matt wasn't a puzzle anymore, he was _Matt_ and Charlie needed this, needed for this one moment to work. He needed a lot of things, ones that he once thought were just the things he wanted.

Matt wasn't a want, he wasn't a whim, he wasn't the actions he had taken or the mistakes they had made. He was more than that. And if Charlie could just find the right place to pull, the right way to move, Matt would come back.

Charlie needed to believe that as much as he needed sunlight.

*

He tried to get into a routine, because routines were supposed to help when the universe became overwhelming. Routines were something to rely on, according to the books. Thirty days and it became a habit. He was counting to thirty again, after months of Charlie and months without.

And so Matt woke up every morning and regretted the day he first met Charlie Crews. It was his new routine. He usually warmed up to it, started by wishing he had woken up dead or at least hadn't spent the whole previous evening getting plastered in some bar. By the time he stumbled into the shower and cut himself shaving, or figured out that he'd run out coffee and the milk had gone bad, it was all about the ways that Charlie Crews was a bastard and possibly trying to drive Matt completely insane.

With the help of the fucking FBI and the LAPD, who decided that Crews and Reese were the only two LA homicide cops capable of being paired up on bureau liaison duty. When Matt had wanted Charlie around, it was like chasing a ghost. Now that he didn't, now that he really needed for Charlie to be somewhere else so that Matt could fall apart without anyone noticing, he couldn't find anywhere to hide.

Every time he turned around, there was Charlie, pretending that everything was fine.

*

Charlie was a moon. A satellite, some quirk of astronomy that slid around a planet, caught in gravity but not close enough to crash. Not near enough to burn away.

He circled there, miles away from Matt, rotating around a pivot that he couldn't understand and couldn't escape.

Charlie couldn't help himself, when he followed Matt home and walked into his house and spent hours and hours trying to give Matt whatever he wanted, trying to make him _ask_ for whatever that was, instead of accepting everything that Charlie gave. He couldn't stop himself from leaning Matt over the table, digging his fingers into the ridge of Matt's hipbones, working him open with fingers and tongue and then holding back, holding him down, holding him still.

When Charlie took Matt with words and gestures and hands sliding over skin, he thought of stars, of comets and the deep cold spaces between the places you could touch. He imagined explosions and galaxies. Worlds ending, universes being born.

*

Most mornings, Matt hated his life. Some mornings, he hated Charlie. The worst mornings were the ones after Charlie had fucked him and then taken off in the middle of the night. It was those mornings that he woke up and hated himself.

*

Cheryl let him back into the FBI office. Charlie didn't thank her, but she still said _you're welcome_. After that she threatened to take out his kneecaps if he didn't fix Matt, but it was all in the interests of unit cohesion. Charlie was pretty sure that it was about the job.

*

Matt almost turned around and walked away when he saw Charlie waiting alone in the conference room.

Well, no. He did turn and walk away—Cheryl called it running, but it was a fast walk, maybe a jog, definitely not running—but he walked right into Frank, who stood there in the hall like the utter traitor he was and then called out, "Charlie Crews. Didn't think we'd be seeing you around here again. Did we, Matt?" Right before he smirked and strolled off, whistling.

After that, Matt didn't have a choice. He really, really, _really_ hated everyone on the planet. And Charlie was at the top of the list.

*

Charlie wanted to start out with a story, something to break the ice. But all the stories he knew involved either prison, dead bodies, or Ted. Except for the ones that featured Matt, but Matt already knew most of those.

He'd tried to find the right words to begin while he waited, but in the end Charlie improvised. "Am I still not allowed to call you names related to fruit? Because I've been keeping a list of possibilities, and I just thought I'd run a few past you, see if any of them might work." Matt stared at him. "I thought maybe a play on kumquats, because that would be funny, not because you're orange or anything, because you're not. Or maybe coconuts? How about bananas? I know you said no bananas last time we talked about it, but I thought you might have changed your mind."

Matt was smiling, but it wasn't a good smile. It was an _if I don't smile I'm going to hurl a stapler at your head_ smile. He must have learned it from Reese. "Are you completely insane? Dani said you were getting better, that you were making sense more often. If she lied to me, I'm going to—something. I don't know what I'll do, but something. You're supposed to be making sense, Charlie, or else what's the point of breaking—' Matt stopped, shook his head, and sighed. "Just tell me what you want this time. Quickly, and with as few digressions as possible."

Reese cared about his sanity. That was nice to know but not important for this conversation. Charlie would be sure to mention it later.

Right now, he needed Matt to be a little rattled, because when Matt got rattled, he sometimes said true things. "Bobby looks like that guy on the radio, so he's been going around asking people to call him Clark Kent. Dani thinks it's a stupid nickname, but Bobby doesn't ask for much, so I thought you might want to know. I'm thinking of giving her one, maybe Doc, because her initials are D.R., which stand for Doc and is a good name to have. It's better than Clark Kent. I'd tell her about it but she keeps promising to make me regret starting conversations."

"Why not? Doc is a good—No, we are not doing this. Enough with the nicknames. What do you _want_? Why are we talking about what you call people?"

Charlie thought it was obvious. "Aren't we always talking about what I call people? Sometimes we're talking about what you call people, but since you aren't talking to me much these days, I don't know anything about that."

"Oh, I'm the one who started this? I'm not the one who stopped answering the phone. I'm not the one who showed up in the rain without a damn umbrella. I'm not the one who stood in front of a gunman and almost got his head blown off. We could talk about any of those decisions, all of them impressively idiotic. But you don't want to talk."

Charlie tried being reasonable, because Matt hated that. "We're talking now."

"Yeah, but this is—Charlie, this is about fucking _nicknames_ and _fruit_ and we're in the office, which is a really stupid place to talk about anything. Trust me on this, it is not the place or the time to actually have a conversation about chairs or childhoods or anything that doesn't involve a firearm."

"When would be a good time? A good place? Because Matt, I don't know what I'm doing, I don't know what the manuals say on this, they're in some language I never learned. I can't read them. You're in Swahili, for all I know. Forget names, I can't even read the alphabet when it comes to what you need out of this. You have to give me a hint, because I can't find the instructions for how to be what we were. What we are."

Matt started waving his arms around. "Fuck, Charlie, instructions? There aren't any instructions. I'm not a piece of flat pack furniture, I'm not a toaster oven. And why are we talking about appliances?" Matt looked away. "This is exactly what I mean. It's never about what it's about, and I can't believe I'm about to say this, but we never talk about what this is, we just avoid it, and avoiding the issue is a bad idea. I am going to be sending Emily flowers until I _die_, because if this is what it's like to lo—if this is what it's like to be fucking an emotional idiot, she was better at it than I am."

Emily was a bit off the topic. Plus he didn't really want to think about Matt fucking Emily, because it made him think about Matt and about fucking, and that made him want to—it made him want things that were not the question at hand. "I just know that you stopped calling and I'm still here but you're not. You're never here when I look for you."

That wasn't quite right, so Charlie started again. "Well, not here, here, because obviously you're here, here, and until Cheryl let me back in today, I wasn't allowed to be here, specifically. But here, in the sense of being _here_. You're like a mirror, and I don't want to be Alice. You have to be more than a reflection of what I want. You have to step through."

"Charlie, I swear that if you don't say something without eight comma clauses and a pithy proverb in the next ten seconds, I'm walking out."

Charlie took a moment, but he turned back and stared Matt down. "Stop looking away when you think about us. I'm right here, standing in front of you and I need you to stop blaming yourself for things that you—" Matt flinched, "—things that just happened." "Can you see that whatever you did, it's done? Can you see that I'm here, and I'm asking you—I'm asking you to see me. To see all the options we have. To see _us_."

*

Charlie didn't know what he was asking, that it was too much, too soon, too little. He didn't know the rest, that Matt had believed him and hadn't done anything, had left Charlie there all that time before he met Constance, sent her to find Charlie and maybe save him. Constance was supposed to be the one having this conversation, the one where Charlie let it go and moved on with the person who brought him back. Constance, or maybe Dani, or hell, even Ted. Anyone but Matt.

Anyone but the one person who hadn't done anything to save Charlie when he needed it most.

*

And just like that, Matt was gone again. He'd been there for a second, but then his face clouded over with other thoughts and Charlie knew that he hadn't gotten through. There wasn't any point in chasing Matt down when he was like this. He needed a different plan of attack.

He didn't stop Matt from walking out.

*

Matt tried not to punch his coworkers, As a regular tactic, it worked really well, because fistfights weren't all that great for office relations.

He was thinking of making an exception for Frank, who just would _not_ shut up about monogrammed towels and economy-sized bottles of lube. Every time Matt turned around, there was Frank, cracking jokes while Cheryl watched and looked vaguely disappointed in one or both of them.

The only thing that held Matt back was the knowledge that when it came to a fight, Frank would win, and then he'd be even more of a smug, condescending, interfering jackass than he already was.

*

Charlie went in search of advice. Ted was good at advice. Ted was his financial advisor, so he should be fine to give all sorts of wise and sage wisdom, which was slightly redundant but when Charlie brought it up like that Ted smiled anyway, because unlike some people Ted appreciated it when Charlie made an effort to be funny.

He asked Ted, and Ted, who was unusually good at advice, thought of something he hadn't. Ted thought Charlie hadn't quite gotten around to mentioning to Matt that he'd talked to Constance, and so he knew the whole sequence, all the pieces of the things that Matt had done and how they fitted together. Ted pointed out that Charlie hadn't said that he knew the good things as well as the bad.

Ted, who was a lot smarter than most people even if he had a tendency to get caught up in illegal activities, suggested that maybe it wasn't entirely fair to expect Matt to read Charlie's mind, to know without being told that they were having an entirely different conversation than the one he intended.

But Matt knew that Charlie had all the facts, because why else would he have shown up at Matt's door, and spent all those nights trying to figure out what Matt wanted, what he wasn't asking Charlie to give? Why else would he drag himself away every morning, so that Matt wouldn't feel pressured, even though what he wanted to do was climb back into Matt's bed and watch him wake up?

What other reason could there be?

Ted let Charlie explain all the ways he'd told Matt the truth, and then he called Charlie an idiot—and really, people called him that a lot, and it had started with Matt but he was getting a little tired of all the insults from other people who didn't mean them the way Matt did—and told him to get on the phone and tell Matt exactly what he was thinking.

But Charlie had been telling Matt all his thoughts for months, even if he hadn't said anything out loud. Ted's plan wasn't any better than Dani's, although it did involve fewer felonies.

*

The absolute last thing in the world that Matt wanted to do was talk to Charlie. But when Dani, who was nearly as irritating as Frank, managed to connect them both into the same call and then hung up—a sneaky goddamn move that was beneath her, really, not that she cared or could hear him complaining—he didn't have a choice.

Matt was making a list of people he wouldn't miss if he decided to start over somewhere else, and Dani was at the top. Right under Charlie, who was on the other end of the line and not saying anything.

The problem was that Matt had called Reese because he wanted her on the case, and he very much didn't want Charlie. Charlie had too much going on, with Ted and Rachel and the wall of his closet that Matt didn't officially know about.

But Dani had ducked out before he could ask, and Cheryl insisted that somebody from the LAPD needed to be brought in because of some antiquated rule with city-owned buildings. So here he was, and Charlie was waiting for Matt to say something. "Charlie. Fuck. I mean—okay, I need you to find me someone who can sit in on this negotiation, somebody who's not going to be called away for a bigger case or get in the way or do anything at all other than sitting quietly in the corner of the room and providing us with a name to put on the paperwork. You think you can find me someone who can do that?"

"I'll be there as soon as I can."

"No, we need someone now, Charlie. Doesn't matter who, just send us some uniform who can be pulled off traffic duty or something. Has to be fast. How about Stark, what's he doing? He'd be fine."

"No, I'll come now. I'll be there soon, Matt."

Matt sighed and hung up. This was a bad idea.

*

He meant to go straight to the scene. Charlie pointed the car in that direction, but then Tidwell called to ask about their current investigation and Charlie got the results back from the lab on Pavel's medal and then things got a little crazy, they always did when the Russian mafia was in the mix. So Charlie called Bobby, and Bobby was headed off duty but he knew a guy who could fill in, and that guy would go over to meet with Matt and everything would be fine. He could call Matt later and get the details.

Charlie figured that by the time he finished the arrest the whole thing would be over, but then as he was driving home Reese called and asked him what had happened over at the Hoover building, because Tidwell was fielding calls about the LAPD presence and who had given authorization to storm the building and command responsibility for civilian casualties.

Matt wasn't picking up, and Charlie suddenly had a bad feeling about Bobby's friend.

*

Matt didn't tell Cheryl that Charlie was supposed to be there. They might not need him, and when they did, when things fell apart and Frank sent his team in and Matt was out, standing outside wishing that he were better at his job, it was too late to do it the right way.

It wasn't Charlie's fault, anyway, because Matt was the one who was in charge of getting someone, and Matt had stepped out of the chain of command and that was the place it went wrong, the place that the blame fell. So when Cheryl suspended him, Matt didn't say anything about Charlie and that was that.

But Charlie showed up and started asking questions, and maybe that wasn't the whole thing after all.

*

Matt was waiting for him. Well, Matt was waiting for someone, and Charlie had learned that when Matt had that particular look on his face it was generally because Charlie had managed to get it wrong, and so by definition Matt was probably waiting for him.

"You weren't here."

"I'm here." Charlie paused, but Matt just looked at him. "I'm here now, and I thought that we sent—"

"You weren't here, Charlie, and you needed to be, or someone needed to be, and I shouldn't have asked, because how am I even surprised? How did I not see this coming? I don't need you tonight, I needed you hours ago."

"I know." Charlie didn't think this was about the bust, somehow. He wasn't sure, but it didn't feel like this was about the bust. And if it wasn't about the bust, he couldn't figure out why Matt wasn't yelling at him. That was what Matt did, he got upset and he yelled and then they were fine. Only Matt wasn't yelling, and that was. Not good.

"I needed you when you said you were going to be here, and I can't do this, Charlie, not now. I have to leave. I can't be here talking to you about this, and you weren't _here_ Charlie. You know how you wanted me to see that you were right there, in front of me? Well you weren't. You aren't there, Charlie."

Charlie thought fast, thought about what Matt wanted to hear. And then he ignored it and said what Matt needed to hear, what would make him see that the whole thing was different this time. "I know. But we're not talking about today anymore, are we? I mean, I don't think we are, and that means we're talking about—what, exactly? Because—and you'll like this story, Matt, it's a good story—I'm here as much as I can be. I'm trying, and you're my Moscow medal and I am trying to find a way to be happy but it's harder than I remember it being. I'm trying to be what you need but Matt, I don't know what that is. I don't know that _you_ know what that is."

"Charlie, you can't really—you don't even know what you're talking about."

Sometimes he wanted to throw things at Matt. But that wouldn't be very productive. Charlie needed all of his calm to finish this, so he paused and took a breath and counted backwards from ten like therapist number five had suggested. "I'm not an idiot."

"I know, I know you're not, but you think that you have all the information and you don't, you think that I just—I left you there, Charlie. I _left_ you there, and I don't know why I'm even telling you this now." He stepped back, but Charlie followed him. "I'm too tired to figure out why we never have a conversation that sounds like a conversation. I don't know why it has to be now, except that you weren't here, and you haven't been here since this started, and I think it's because I left you there even though I knew you couldn't, knew you didn't—"

"I _know_. I know, Matt, how can you think I didn't know? You could build _worlds_ out of all the things I know now that I didn't know before. I called Connie, and I asked, and I know, Matt. I know, and I don't care, and I don't think you should care, either. I think you're my Moscow medal, and I don't care what else you are. It's changed, I've changed, the past doesn't matter. It's different if we say it is. You have to believe me, this is not the same."

Matt stared at him. "What are you even talking about? You—Charlie, it doesn't work like that."

"It should. Why doesn't it? Why can't it work like that, if we want it to?"

Matt stepped toward Charlie, looked at him steadily, like he had something else to say, but then he shifted his bag and walked past. Charlie watched him go. Matt needed time to think, he always did, Charlie could see that now. Matt needed time and in the morning he'd see sense. He'd see that Charlie was right this time.

***

_When I count, there are only you and I together  
But when I look ahead up the white road  
There is always another one walking beside you_

**T.S. Eliot, "The Wasteland**

*

Matt drove home fast and turned off his cell phone. And then he spent the night getting extremely drunk. Drunk in ways that he wasn't sure were possible before he tried them. No one called, but that was because his phone was off, because he turned it off so no one could call, because he didn't want to talk to anyone who might want to talk to him. He didn't want to talk to anyone because he wasn't going to work in the morning, because Charlie had—he didn't want to talk about it, and everyone had his phone number, and so he should probably turn the ringer off on the phone in his house, too.

And so he did that, and then he had another drink, and another, until the bottle was empty. When the bottle was empty he found another one, and he drank shots from that one until he couldn't manage to hold the bottle steady to pour the whiskey into the glass, and after that he just drank it straight out of the bottle because alcohol was a disinfectant and he wasn't sharing it with anyone so it didn't matter either way.

Matt kept waiting for it to get easier but it didn't. It never got easier, and he hated that the most.

So when he walked past the window for the third bottle and saw Charlie's car parked across the street, he didn't unlock his front door. He didn't go outside and he didn't climb into the car and say that he was sorry, or lean in Charlie's window and kiss him. Instead, Matt passed out.

*

Charlie had learned enough about love not to try and force it. Love either worked or didn't, and so he left Matt alone. Well, nearly so.

He didn't kick in the door, not even when he heard the crash of glass breaking and Matt shouting, because Matt was fine, Charlie could see that from the street. Matt wasn't in trouble, no one was threatening him. He was just angry and Charlie didn't know how—he couldn't fix that.

He was definitely growing as a person, because six months ago he'd have picked the lock and carried Matt to bed when he fell asleep. But he didn't do that. He just kept calling Matt's phone and trying to explain.

*

Matt woke up with a hangover, panicked at dreams he couldn't remember beyond flashes of colors and uneasy regret. His answering machine was blinking steadily and when he turned his phone back on it held twenty-seven messages. Twelve from Charlie, five from Reese, seven from Cheryl, two from Emily, one from Frank. In that order.

The last one worried him.

*

He let his father think that it would be Olivia at the door. Charlie hadn't matured so much that he could resist the image of his father meeting Matt without warning, without time to process and judge and decide whether he agreed. His father hated surprises, and that was most of the fun in letting him believe things that weren't true.

He hoped that Matt would forget to check for other people in the house before they got to the part with the kissing and apologies, but really, Charlie wasn't picky. As long as he opened his front door and found Matt on the other side, he didn't care what happened next.

*

Matt drove to the hospital in a blur. He'd need a new mailbox and possibly a new cell phone, because the messages didn't tell him anything new, just repeated _gunshot_ and _unconscious_ and _lungs_. They didn't tell him what was happening now and no one was answering their phones and the switchboard wouldn't page someone to tell Matt what in the _hell_ was going on, and—he would definitely need a new mailbox. Later.

He used his flashers for the last few miles, and Matt didn't care about the rules that said he couldn't. He needed to be where Charlie was. That meant that everyone else, all of the people in between, were in the way and that meant driving too fast and that meant running a few red lights and Matt did what he needed to get there.

The parking lot was insane, a mass of cruisers and cops and random people interested in the excitement. Matt spotted a couple of familiar faces in the crowd, people from cases that Charlie had worked on, cops who were usually the ones standing around in the station when he came to find Charlie.

None of the people outside would know anything, so Matt walked past them and through the doors and then upstairs, following the stream of people in badges to the place where Charlie would be waiting for him, annoying and bored and awake, because he would be fine, he had to be fine. He was always just _fine_ when Matt got there. Charlie was fine.

*

Conversations with convicted murderers were mildly less frustrating when the murderers weren't dead.

*

Charlie wasn't—Charlie was being wheeled into surgery, and no, Matt couldn't see him, he couldn't talk to him, he couldn't take just one goddamn second to do something, anything, to let Charlie know that he was there. Matt needed to _step out of the way, please, sir, we're doing everything we can_ because _someone will find you when we're finished._ He did it, numbly shifting to one side, barely managing to wrap his fingers around Charlie's wrist for an instant as the gurney pushed past and left him behind.

Matt didn't argue with Reese when she found him, standing in the hallway watching the place where Charlie wasn't. He just followed her back to the waiting room and sat down, head in his hands and all the words he hadn't said piled up at his feet.

*

Something somewhere was ringing. Beeping. Charlie couldn't open his eyes, but he wished that whoever was ringing would answer the phone. Matt never answered his phone.

*

Emily called and Reese answered, handed her phone to Matt and walked away. Matt didn't need to talk to Emily, he didn't need to be comforted, he didn't need—he needed one thing, and he couldn't have it, because Charlie was still in surgery. It had been hours and hours now and no one was saying anything helpful, no one was telling Matt what to do, what to say, how to fix this.

He didn't know what he told Emily, but she hung up first. Matt tossed the phone down and went to wait in the hallway instead. There were no phones out there. There were no chairs in rows around the room, no couches to sit on and avoid the glances of everyone else waiting. No television set to a news channel, no mentions of unsolved shootings or hospitalized cops.

He was counting floor tiles when Cheryl found him. He wasn't thinking, he was counting. There were a lot of tiles, he could keep himself busy with them for hours. Had done, in fact, because he kept losing count partway through, every time the system crackled to life and no one called for him to watch Charlie wake up.

Cheryl sounded like Emily, repeating that it wasn't Matt's fault, that they were looking for the shooter, that everything would be fine, that he shouldn't worry. That there wasn't anything he could do but wait. Cheryl told him all the things Emily had said, all the things Reese had said, and Matt pretended it was helpful.

There were 137 tiles and Cheryl was still talking to him, but Matt wasn't listening to her, he was listening to the silence where Charlie's voice ought to be. And then his phone rang and someone paged Charlie's family, called him upstairs and he pushed past Cheryl and ran.

*

Being dead was a lot like solitary. Charlie tried not to be disappointed, but he had been hoping for hell to be slightly less literal.

*

Matt didn't know what a medically induced coma was exactly, but Charlie looked—Charlie looked like he was gone somewhere else, like limbo and lost souls. Matt couldn't watch.

They wouldn't let him in the room to stay. He got fifteen minutes every four hours, and Matt set his alarm because he wanted to know that it was coming, that the nurse was on her way to tap him on the shoulder and pull back the curtain. Charlie would be there, pale and unmoving and hooked up to machines that beeped and whooshed and _breathed_ for him, dripped drugs into him to keep him that way, beneath the bandages and the iodine and the quiet that Matt knew wasn't death, not really. Matt needed a moment to prepare for it, to convince himself that Charlie was still there.

He set his pager, and the third time, the time when the alarm went off and no one came to get him, Matt prayed. He hadn't done it in years, decades, but if there was a chance that someone was listening he would take it. He would do whatever might help, and if that meant praying or meditating or giving up his car and his job and his subscriptions to _Playboy_ and _Guns and Ammo_, Matt would do it. He wouldn't miss them. He would trade—he didn't have anything he'd keep.

He sat outside the open door, where doctors and nurses hovered behind a curtain pulled shut and said things he didn't understand, words he didn't recognize, and his fingers twitched for beads, for the tug of a rosary and the comfort of faith. He didn't close his eyes, because Charlie would want him here and that meant remembering the empty shadows beneath the equipment, the whir of machines, the squeak of footsteps on linoleum and the nearly invisible buzz of lights and distant phones ringing.

He was making promises to the saints in charge of cops and fools, trying to remember which saints were the right ones, when Emily showed up to drag him to the cafeteria.

Matt didn't ask why she was there. He counted the tiny flecks of gold in the floor. Charlie would want to know if the flecks were real gold or something else, and Matt didn't know the answer, couldn't think of who to ask, and when he asked Emily she sighed and walked away. He scraped at the gold with his heel but it was permanent, a part of the floor, wound up in it until they were the same thing, even if they started out in different places. Maybe Charlie already knew the answer.

Emily came back with coffee and a sandwich, sat quietly next to Matt for a few minutes and watched him eat. Then she stood, grabbed her bag, and left him alone. Two hours and seventeen minutes later, Matt's pager beeped and a different nurse tapped his shoulder and told him he had fifteen minutes.

*

Charlie listened to Matt's voice, but it was like being underwater. All tones and hesitations and no words that he could understand. But it was good to know Matt was waiting for him.

*

Emily was waiting when he walked out, and she pulled him to the elevator, ignored him when he tried to stop and sit back down. She was stronger than she looked. When they got to the basement and stopped in front of the blood bank, Matt looked at her and she shrugged.

He waited outside while she donated, because she could, hadn't been engaging in any risky behaviors with Charlie or anyone else, probably. Emily didn't do risky, she never had. Matt tried not to care that he was here standing in a too-bright hallway watching strangers try not to meet his eyes while she was inside doing something useful.

When he stopped on the way to the elevator, when he turned the handle to an empty room and pinned Emily up against the door, picked her up and wrapped her legs around his waist, Emily kissed him back.

She kissed him, and he forgot for a second, forgot why this was a bad idea. He forgot because Emily tasted the same as she had years ago, nothing like Charlie. Her legs around his hips didn't remind him of Charlie's fingers wound through his or Charlie racing up the stairs to the bedroom. Her grip on Matt's shoulders didn't echo Charlie on his knees, Charlie doing pushups over Matt, the two of them sprawled on the floor and Charlie pretending to exercise but stealing kisses when he got close enough. This half-dark room didn't remind Matt of Charlie's kitchen and mornings over coffee, of Matt's foyer and replacing the picture frames knocked to the floor when they crashed against the wall, when Charlie dragged Matt closer by his belt loops and they stumbled, laughing, toward the shower.

And then Emily grabbed his hair and pulled, held him away and told him he didn't want to do this, didn't want her, didn't know what he was asking.

Matt let her believe it. They spent the rest of the night sitting next to each other, waiting for Matt's alarm to interrupt nonexistent conversations. In the morning, Emily left to catch her plane back to the place she had chosen but she pressed her hotel key into Matt's hand and told him to keep it, that if he needed a room around the corner to take a break, he should use it.

She said that he might eventually need a place that didn't make him think of Charlie with every breath. Matt shrugged off her hand on his arm. He didn't see that happening, but nothing was impossible. Not when it came to Charlie.

*

He could get used to this. He waited, and people appeared to talk to him, and then they vanished. While he waited, he closed his eyes and watched Matt, in all the times before and some that hadn't happened yet.

*

The doctors didn't know when Charlie would wake up. They didn't know, or they wouldn't tell Matt, which came down to the same answer. It didn't make any sense, Matt had been talking to doctors for thirty-four hours and they hadn't had any trouble filling him in before. Nobody had asked who he was, because—Matt didn't know why they hadn't asked. But they hadn't, not until now.

He wanted to question it because if something happened Matt was the one to tell, the one who could explain to them what Charlie might want, if anyone could ever know what Charlie wanted. Matt wanted to know what had changed, started to ask, but then his pager went off and it was time to go. He turned away and headed back upstairs to watch Charlie sleep until someone told him the time was up.

*

Time was passing. Charlie couldn't tell how quickly, but he felt it go.

*

The nurse stopped Matt at the door. At first he didn't understand, couldn't wrap his brain around what she was telling him.

Once he figured it out, though, Matt lost his grip a little.

Charlie's father—for fuck's sake, Charlie didn't even _like_ his father. Hated him, maybe even more than Matt hated his own father, and that was really impressive, that was a lot of anger. That was the reason that they never talked about fathers. And it was the reason that when Matt saw him, saw Charlie's father being wheeled out of the room and looking like he'd finished some _chore_, some irritating task that he needed to complete in order to get to the next item on a list of things he didn't want to do, Matt's brain went white.

Frank grabbed him by the back of the shirt and held on. Matt stumbled at the sudden stop and kept pulling, twisted himself to swing at Frank and get away, get to Charlie before the doors closed, get to Charlie's father and do something, anything, make him wish he'd been smart enough to stay away longer. Make him feel like Matt did now, like Charlie had felt every time he'd sat in that interview room and looked up to see Matt—the guy who didn't even know him, wanted him to do a fucking _job_, the guy who would get him sent back to the infirmary, to the hospital, to solitary—instead of his family.

Matt just wanted to hurt someone, and if Charlie's father was the person in front of him, then that would be great. That would be more than he could have hoped for. Hitting Charles Crews, making him bleed, would be something he could do for Charlie, that kid in prison with no one to visit him. Something he could do for Charlie now, even if Charlie didn't know about it. That would be something.

Mr. Crews gestured to the woman pushing his chair, a woman with red hair who wasn't Charlie's mother, and Matt finally shoved Frank off, stood in front of Charlie's room trying to catch his breath, trying to remember why it was that he couldn't strangle anyone, not today. Frank crossed his arms and leaned against the opposite wall, just out of reach but close enough to jump.

Three hours and thirty-seven minutes until his next chance. It was enough time to put something right. Matt followed the wheelchair down the hallway and then sprinted down the stairs when the elevator doors closed in front of him. Cheryl saw him come out the door and stepped into his path.

*

For a while, Charlie thought he heard his father. He knew it must be a trick of his memory, though, and that Matt would be back soon.

*

Matt was getting really sick of people acting like he was about to implode. He was doing okay, he just wanted to talk to Mr. Crews for a minute. He could do that, he could hold it together that long. He was a professional. Matt did this for a living, put aside everything that he felt and turned it into the job, the things that he needed and the things that they wanted and lives hanging in the balance.

He wanted to negotiate a little, that was all. Charlie's father had access to Charlie's records, to his doctors and to his room and to _Charlie_, who was—who was Matt's, the same way that Matt had been Charlie's for so long that Emily was a faint memory. Charlie's father had that, it didn't belong to him, and Matt needed it back.

If negotiating didn't work, Stark and Frank had offered to break kneecaps. Matt was tempted, but he didn't think he needed the help.

*

Charlie thought this might be a dream. It was probably a dream, because when it actually happened he didn't remember thinking to himself that Matt was finally here, that he was going to listen and know what to do next. He just remembered staring at the cuffs on his hands and waiting for someone to tell him why he wasn't back in the yard.

It was better than the dream where Charlie was a fish, so he stayed to see if things ended the same way.

*

Matt didn't ask what they did to get his name on the visitor list. Cheryl looked at him, and she looked at the doctor and the two of them walked away, and when Matt asked again they let him in.

Emily was gone back to her life, Charlie's father wouldn't be coming back again tonight or anytime soon, and everyone else had gone home to sleep, to shower, to go back to their lives. Matt didn't care. It meant that he could sit without making conversation, without the awkward ways that people would start a question and then trail off, suddenly unsure of where the line hovered between small talk and a wake.

Matt knew that if he waited long enough, the halls would go quiet and he'd be able to think about what happened next. All the moments would string together and he'd stop racing his thoughts around all the things that he hadn't done and just be able to sit and breathe.

He was waiting for that moment. The one where everything slowed down.

When Cheryl stopped on her way to work, sat down next to him on the floor where he'd shifted when the chair grew too uncomfortable, he was still waiting. She pushed at him, reminded him that he needed to show up for a meeting, a discussion about his suspension, a dozen things that Matt didn't think mattered, not now. Things that could wait until later, until Charlie was awake and back in the world and safe.

It was either leave or tell her to take the job and give it to someone else, he didn't want it anymore, _fuck_ the job and everything attached to it, because the job meant that he couldn't ever have a conversation that didn't turn into a negotiation. The job was what made Charlie think he could _handle_ Matt, get him to admit to all the things he couldn't—didn't—say. The job was where it all started, and Matt had wanted it then, wanted it enough to use Charlie to get it all those years ago, but he didn't know what he wanted now.

He chose to walk away from Cheryl before he said anything, because he still hadn't found a hesitation that would let him think.

He smoked a cigarette and thought about the reasons that now was a bad time to get fired, and in that ten minutes, as he fumbled for a lighter and watched that first bent cigarette burn down to ash, forgot to smoke it and lit another, everything changed.

*

There was sunlight shifting across the ceiling, parallelograms of light floating above Charlie like he was still on his floor, waiting for the ambulance. When the nurses asked him if he wanted to see anyone, he asked for Matt, asked for someone to find Matt and bring him back. He got Reese.

Charlie knew there was an explanation for that, that the universe was giving him a message, but he didn't quite hear it the first time.

*

Matt walked back in and Dani was waiting for him. She looked like hell, and Matt thought about telling her that but when he opened his mouth, she held up a hand and said, "Charlie's awake."

*

Matt was here, he had been here the whole time and Charlie knew that he wanted to see Matt but Reese was worried about them both and she was here now. She wanted to know who had shot him, what Charlie remembered, whether there was anything he thought might be important.

Charlie told her what she needed to know, and no more than that. He knew Matt shouldn't stay any longer. He needed to sleep, to go to work, to not put his life on hold again while he waited for Charlie to get out. Charlie would still be here in a few hours, and that would be soon enough.

Charlie was patient. He could wait.

*

Matt started toward the stairs but Dani stopped him, and Matt knew he'd missed his chance, that he should have run when he saw her face, before he heard anything to keep him away. He stared at her a moment too long, but managed to ask, "Did he say anything?"

Dani nodded slowly. "He said he didn't remember who shot him." She looked away, and Matt was afraid of what was coming next, he didn't want to hear this, but he didn't interrupt. "He wants you to go home, Matt."

"He doesn't—of course he doesn't. Just because I—"

Dani shook her head. "I don't think that's it, I think he's trying to be—he's trying to let go, Matt." She straightened her shoulders, and Matt had thought—he thought it couldn't get any worse. "He can't remember who was at the door, and somebody's going to come find you and ask this, and I—it should be me. Where were you when Charlie was shot?"

They stood there, Dani looking guilty and Matt—Matt didn't know what he was feeling. Tired, mostly. Exhausted and empty and Charlie didn't want to see him, Charlie wanted him gone, so why was he still here? What was he waiting for? "It wasn't me. I was asleep next to my couch. Ask Charlie about it, he was sitting in his car watching me when I passed out. He'll probably remember that part. I got pretty creative with the names I called him." Dani didn't say anything, and Matt sighed. "You've got my number if there are any other questions. Tell Charlie—tell him I stayed until—tell him I didn't—tell him I was here. Tell him that, if he asks."

Matt was putting his jacket on, nothing to say, no arguments left to give, when Dani reached out and grabbed his arm. He pulled away and walked out, barely even registering her protests, that he should come back in a few hours, when Charlie woke up again, that he wanted to see Matt, that he was just being stubborn and not thinking. They didn't mean anything, nothing meant anything.

Emily's key was still in his pocket and one of Charlie's stupid tapes was playing in his car stereo and Matt just needed to be in a place where everyone else in the world couldn't see him, just for a little while, just until he decided where Charlie ended and he began. He needed a break, a moment to think. When Matt dragged himself into the room and dropped onto the bed, he didn't hear anything else until Cheryl called two days later.

*

Charlie hated jello. He hated the green kind and the orange kind and he really hated the red kind, the red kind was the worst. It jiggled and it was cheerful and it wasn't even food, it wasn't made of fruit and Charlie didn't like anything that pretended to be what it wasn't. He despised applesauce and he didn't want to see Reese or Bobby or even Ted, who he couldn't see because Ted was back in jail and that was Charlie's fault but there was nothing he could do about it now.

He didn't want to see Tidwell, who only wanted to know who had fired the shot, or Frank, who also wanted to know who fired the shot but was less direct when he asked. He didn't want to see his father, who hadn't come to see him anyway. He didn't want to see Cheryl, who knew where Matt was but wouldn't go get him, bring him here so that Charlie could—so that Charlie could—so that Matt wouldn't be somewhere else.

When Charlie closed his eyes, he saw Matt. He spent a lot of time asleep.

*

Matt told Cheryl to fuck off. Not in so many words, but that's what he meant and she figured it out quickly because Cheryl was smart and she'd been listening to him for a long time. Matt said a few other things, too, but that was the important part. They needed to be clear on that. Cheryl wanted him to do something, be somewhere, and Cheryl could take what she wanted and shove it.

She didn't sound happy, but that wasn't Matt's problem. Matt's problem was finding a way to be someone without Charlie, because all this—this whole year had made it obvious that at some point, he would lose Charlie to some fear he couldn't even see from the moment he was in right now, the one with Matt on a motel bed and Charlie in a hospital bed and all of it up in the air.

Charlie was already gone, had pushed him away, and Matt still saw the possibilities when he closed his eyes.

*

Someone sent a fruit basket full of pineapple and kumquats, and Charlie had to trust that the gift meant what he hoped. That it wasn't a goodbye, it was a promise.

It was difficult, when he went home and couldn't drive or work a case or swim or do much of anything but sit in bed and try not to think, but Charlie did his best.

He kept getting fruit baskets with no signature, and they made it easier.

*

Cheryl kept calling, and Matt kept answering, because she wouldn't give him updates otherwise. He tried to keep it short. He tried to hang up before she gave him any messages but he usually couldn't make himself put down the phone that fast. Matt at least managed to hang up before Leah could track the calls, although he sometimes missed pieces of the conversation because he was counting backward in his head.

He always paid for the fruit deliveries in cash. He called Don Eppes, the one guy in the LA Bureau who didn't already know what had happened from six other people, and locked up his house and walked away.

*

He didn't complain, and every day when he called Cheryl told him the same thing, that she didn't know where Matt was but he was fine, he was doing okay, he hadn't asked about Charlie.

Every day, Cheryl told Matt that Charlie was waiting for him to come back, because Charlie was. When Charlie called he didn't always ask, but she always knew to pass on his message.

Patience was harder to practice when there weren't any locks to hold him together.

*

He stopped in to pick up his stuff when nobody was around. It was quiet, and Matt wondered about what situation had them all out of the office, what barricade they were all behind. Whether Charlie was there watching, or if he was still waiting for clearance, for his badge and his gun and his chance to put himself in the path of another deadly projectile.

He didn't leave a note. Nobody waiting for him would need one. He left his cell phone on Cheryl's desk with his new number programmed in. She'd know what to do with it, and how long to wait before she did.

*

The doctor let Charlie keep the bullet. He had plans for it, plans that had nothing to do with Matt or Reese or anyone important. The bullet was an object, a thing with a destiny and a history and it was meaningless.

His badge was an object, too, but Charlie couldn't quite bring himself to call it meaningless. When Reese tossed it back to him—a little high, because she couldn't resist one last check of his reflexes, which were _fine_—Charlie felt something inside him unknot. It was time to go back to being a cop. It was time to start looking for Matt.

He ran through all the conversations that might help, and decided that the first step would be asking around, see if Matt was still in LA. He probably was, because Charlie didn't think Matt would still be answering Cheryl's calls if he weren't close enough to get to Charlie if he needed to fix something. Charlie trusted his instincts, and his instincts said that Matt was terrible at leaving people.

*

Cheryl invited him to the party that Stark threw the day Charlie came back on active duty. There was no way she expected Matt to show up, and so he didn't.

He stayed up the block, in a rented car, watching as Charlie careened into a parking spot out front and jogged up the walk, late for his own party, looking like himself again. When Charlie stopped at the door, shook his head and spun to scan the street on both sides, Matt didn't move. There was no way Charlie could recognize him from here, even if Matt hadn't been wearing a pair of sunglasses and an old ball cap borrowed from Don's closet.

He was safe, they both were, as long as Matt didn't get close enough for Charlie to see him.

*

Charlie didn't know why he stopped, just that the feeling of being watched had suddenly crawled up his spine and pulled him away from Bobby's door. A flash of motion halfway down the block caught his eye, but before he had time to check it out, Bobby was opening the door, pulling him into the room and through the house to the backyard.

There were a lot of people at the party that Charlie knew, but none of them were Matt and so he did a lot of smiling and didn't take off his sunglasses. When he kept his eyes covered, no one saw how far the smile went.

Reese gave him a few concerned glances, and Frank brought him a beer and asked a bunch of questions that meant he suspected something was up but wasn't ready to call Charlie a liar yet. But mostly people simply took the party for what it was supposed to be, and Charlie found himself at the center of far too many conversations about where Matt was and why he was late and whether the two of them were following the marriage debate. Charlie gritted his teeth and made excuses and tried not to check his watch any more than necessary.

When he got a moment alone, Charlie slipped back out through the neighboring backyards, following fences until he was even with where he'd seen the car parked. It was empty now, but he memorized the plate numbers before Bobby started shouting for him again.

He'd check later to see why it was there, which case or mystery it was connected to. Very few things in Charlie's life were random, and he doubted that this, a car parked outside Bobby Stark's house with an occupant who didn't come to the party, was one of those random things.

*

When Charlie found out that someone had rented a car and parked it outside his old partner's house, he told his new partner all about it. Over blended coffee drinks, which had recently replaced the fruit as Charlie's weird food obsession of the month. Matt knew full well that Charlie couldn't make a cup of coffee to save his life.

And then Dani, who was considerably more suspicious than Charlie would ever manage, called to describe the whole sequence and yelled at Matt for being a creepy stalker and a coward at the same time. Which was entirely fair, since she was right about his actions, if not about his motives.

*

Charlie said he had errands to run, and Reese glanced distractedly at him and nodded, waved him out the door.

Matt was painfully predictable about things like parking on the third floor of the FBI garage. Charlie waited, because Cheryl had said she had a meeting and Charlie couldn't miss the tone of her voice, the one that she saved for the times Matt was being especially frustrating. He'd gotten a lot better at listening these days. And so when Matt walked back out, Charlie was waiting for him.

He was waiting, but when Matt got close enough he was on his phone and he didn't seem to want to be interrupted. Charlie waited, but didn't get out of the car before Matt started up his rental and drove away. Their timing was still off.

*

On balance, Matt was grateful that it was actually Reese on the phone, not Charlie borrowing her number. That was the only thing that made him feel better about the way that he was trying to walk down a hallway away from meeting with Cheryl, a meeting that he had been _forced_ to attend before she would argue for his reinstatement, a meeting in which she had called him all sorts of things, none of them complimentary, and tried to run his love life, which was not her fault or her concern.

And now he was trying to walk away from that awkward conversation while Reese yelled in his ear, creating a whole different awkward conversation that seemed, like the one he'd just finished, to require very little in the way of speaking on Matt's part.

"I can't believe I'm asking this, but I am, because you are both behaving irrationally and it's getting ridiculous." Before Matt could point out that he was _entirely_rational, probably for the first time since he and Charlie had met, she kept going. "Look can you call him, just for a couple of minutes? Would that be so hard? Because he's driving us all crazy and he's not even doing it on purpose. It's not the game he plays, not some zen exercise in annoying everyone he talks to. He's just—he misses you, and he's trying to let you have your space. And he's really bad at that, you know he is."

Of course Matt knew. Charlie's issues with personal space were the reason he was sleeping on Don's couch and avoiding all the places Charlie loved most. "That's new. Doesn't sound like Charlie. Did you check for implants or antennae? Maybe he's a robot."

Dani spluttered at him. "What did I do to deserve—for fuck's sake, you're as bad as—" Matt jerked the phone away from his ear. It sounded like Dani was banging it against a desk, and that couldn't be something the warranty covered. When she came back on the line, she was calmer. "Knock it off. You know how he's coping with not talking to you? He's talking _about_ you. All the time. To everyone. There are things I don't need to know about you, Matt, and I spend a lot of time hearing them these days. Call him, because if he drives me insane—and he's going to drive me insane, if he doesn't stop being so fucking _Charlie_ about all this—I am going to hunt you down myself. You don't want me to do that. If—and when—I find you, it's not going to be pretty."

Matt didn't ask her to explain what was going on. He knew Charlie as well as she did, maybe better, and he could picture the last few weeks, as Charlie talked around his actual issues using nature metaphors and random sentences. If it had been Matt, he'd have called a lot sooner. He'd have led with the threat, not the sympathy.

Then again, if it had been Matt, he'd have shut Charlie up with a well-timed blowjob and the promise of no sex until he worked out his issues on someone else. So really, the situations didn't compare all that well. "You'd have to find me before he does."

"I know you're in town, dumbass. Charlie saw the car and he hasn't figured out who it was because he's busy trying to wrap his head around that empty space where you used to be. But it was you in the car, and if you're not going to be in his life then will you at least tell him that? And then get the hell out completely. Make up your mind. Stop sending him gift baskets, because I'm sick of the look he gets on his face every time he sees them."

Reese sounded frustrated and unhappy and Matt felt a little guilty about that—not guilty enough to follow her advice, but guilty enough to want to consider it. "Okay, fine, I'm still around, but I think he knows that."

Reese muttered something under her breath about stupid morons and bananas, but Matt didn't quite catch it. "He's not sure. But he's going to keep thinking about it, and when it clicks into place, you know what's going to happen. You know what he'll do, Matt, he'll drop everything and he'll decide you don't really mean it, that you want him to make the first move, and then he'll do something idiotic and irrational and probably romantic but also illegal. And he'll get arrested, and you'll get arrested trying to fix whatever he screws up, and then _I'm_ going to have to bail you both out. And I don't want you having makeup sex in the back of my car, so let's just skip it. You can call him now and avoid the whole mess, and I don't have to pay extra for disinfection and detailing."

Matt smiled at that, because it did sound like the sort of thing that would happen to them. "I promise never to sully your car with Charlie, Reese. I like his car better."

"I know that. You think I don't know that? I am never riding in his car again, not after the story about—come talk to him, get this all worked out, and then I can go back to my job and not hear about all the ways you wake up in the morning, because I do _not_ want to hear those things. I'm a captive audience and he's afraid of what you're thinking and even the threats aren't getting through to him this time. He—I think maybe he's convinced himself that if he finds someone to blame for his arrest, you'll stop blaming yourself. He told me about the bar, and you know you didn't send him there, right? Tell me you don't think that."

Dani paused, and when she started talking again, Matt could hear the worry in it, for him and for Charlie and for the secrets Charlie was unraveling without anyone's help. "You know what's coming, Matt. You need to be here when it all crashes down. He's scared and he'll need you when the pieces start to fit together."

Near Charlie was exactly where Matt _couldn't_ be when it all crashed down. Dani had to already know that, she was smart enough to understand why Matt was being so stubborn suddenly.

Charlie was still working on getting his life back, and Matt had been trying to ignore the whole thing. They didn't need to talk about what it meant, because Charlie was painfully predictable in his refusal to do the smart thing and let people come to him. "I can't. Not yet, and—Dani, I want to. I want to but that's why I can't. Just—tell him I'm sorry, and tell him to be careful. Tell him—tell him what he needs to hear, but don't tell him where I am."

Reese hung up on him.

Matt hoped she was relieved. Probably furious and definitely scary and possibly nearly homicidal, but relieved. He didn't think Dani would come and hunt him down just yet. But Matt stopped parking in Charlie's neighborhood to make sure that he was coming home at night, just in case he was wrong.

*

Reese didn't tell him about her conversation with Matt for three days. In between, she was a little more patient, and that was worrying enough that Charlie started checking under his desk for whatever traps she'd left that had her so nervous. He tried not to talk about things that reminded him of Matt, which left him with remarkably little to say.

They were waiting for one of two suspects in a robbery-homicide to break and turn in the other—they'd ordered pizza, but Charlie didn't think it would arrive in thirty minutes, so he was trying to decide whether the delivery guy would still need a tip other than _drive faster next time_—when the silence finally made her crack and admit that she had gotten Matt's new number from Emily, who had gotten it from Cheryl, who was still refusing to give the number to Charlie directly and had made Emily swear not to pass it on to anyone else.

Charlie didn't know if that was Matt's request—it sounded like something Matt would ask, because Matt would know that if he didn't Charlie would consider it tacit permission to plead his case—or just another example of people trying to interfere for their own good, but it didn't really matter. The result was the same. If Charlie actually called Matt, somebody was going to get in trouble, and that somebody wasn't going to be Reese, because if it was, she would make sure that Charlie ended up in one of the trunks left from the creepy kid with the juvie record, the record that Matt didn't mention until after the case was over, because sometimes Matt followed the rules even when they were pointless.

Charlie knew he could just borrow Reese's phone later and check her call log. Neither of them needed to mention that she would leave it sitting out on the desk and then walk away in a few minutes.

He really appreciated the ways that they had developed their partnership to allow for the sort of plans that didn't require either of them to admit that they were behaving badly. But he wouldn't call Matt until he had thought of a plausible excuse for getting the number that would keep Reese from pushing him into an elevator shaft.

*

He put in for the transfer through channels, but transfers meant performance reviews and that meant it took about five minutes for Cheryl to find out what he was doing. Matt had been hoping for more time to come up with a reason she couldn't refuse.

He didn't think telling her it was only temporary, until he could figure out what came next, was going to be all that convincing. At the moment, though, it was all he had.

***

_I was seized by joy,  
and someone saw me there,  
and that was the worst of all,  
lacerating and unforgettable._

**Vijay Seshadri, 'Memoir"**

 

*

Charlie thought maybe it was time to give up. It had been two months since he walked out of the hospital and Matt hadn't done or said anything to show he was coming back. He'd waited out the suspension and then taken all his leave and the whole time, all those weeks, all Charlie had heard from him was a basket of fruit every Monday. And they didn't count, because fruit baskets weren't the same as talking, weren't Matt coming to the door and walking inside and letting Charlie convince him that this time it would be better, because this time they both had their eyes open.

He could give up, start flirting with Jennifer again or call Gina and Tina or even Constance, although none of them had the same appeal that they once had. Hell, he could probably start flirting with Ted, although that would be weird and would require that he get Ted out of prison again—he was working on that—and flirting wouldn't be much of a welcome home gift. He'd thought about them, about all of those options. Turned them over in his mind when he couldn't sleep.

Only, every time Charlie got out his phone and started paging through the numbers, looking for someone who could help replace—every time he thought about it, or about asking someone to—all he saw was Matt, that look he got when Charlie had found the right thing to say, made him happy. Or Matt, on his back in the middle of the bed, laughing up at Charlie and pulling him in for another kiss before they had to face the day. Matt, standing in Charlie's kitchen, hair in his eyes and his feet bare, blinking at his coffee like it had all the answers to every question and was made of pure happiness.

And so instead of calling anyone else, Charlie opened Ted's laptop and kept looking for places in the city that Matt could be sleeping at night. He wasn't at home, Charlie had checked there and there was dust in the air and the plants needed water. He kept checking, just in case, but so far Matt was better at hiding than Charlie was at seeking.

He took the plants home with him, because they were helpless and they needed someone to keep them alive.

*

Matt didn't need to talk to Frank. Frank was—he didn't need to talk to Frank about choices and plans and Charlie. This was blackmail, is what it was, and he wouldn't stand for it.

Only Cheryl was damn good at blackmail, had a lot of practice at making the most effective threats to get her way. Matt didn't stand a chance and now he was standing in a parking lot, watching Frank walk over.

Frank looked about as happy about the whole situation as Matt was. "Let's get this over with. I'm here to convince you to drop the transfer, and we both know Cheryl will kick my ass if I don't. So how about you agree, I go back and tell her mission accomplished, and on the way to the office I drop you off downtown so that you can patch things up with Crews. Because I'm telling you, if he calls me one more time asking if I've seen you and whether you look like you might have scurvy, I'm going to box him up and mail him to Alaska."

Matt shrugged. "He's okay then?"

"He's crazy. Maybe crazier than he was before, but I wouldn't know for sure. He's not dead or anything, although they've got a pool going on whether Reese or Tidwell will snap first. I guess he's been giving the two of them relationship advice."

Matt rolled his eyes. "If I put ten bucks on Reese, you're going to keep my winnings, aren't you?"

"Absolutely. And while we're not on the subject, you want to tell me what happened to you guys? Because it's well past time for me to be home watching television and eating a cheeseburger, and yet here I am, trying to get you laid or at least back to your job." He paused, but Matt didn't answer. "I think I liked it better when you were fighting with Emily. She was faster with the insults. Crews just keeps telling me about how you're good in bed and can cook hash browns, and that's not the sort of thing I want to hear three or four times a week." Frank paused again, and Matt waited him out by reciting the state capitals in his head. He got as far as Dover. "So what did he do to you?"

Tallahassee, Altanta, Honolulu, where Matt had planned to take Charlie when— "He didn't—nothing happened." Frank just watched him, waiting for the rest. "Nothing happened recently, nothing new. We didn't have a fight." Matt kicked at the gravel.

"I got that much. Would have been hard to fight with him when the last time you were in the same room he was unconscious."

"He was unconscious the first time, too. Or, no. The second time." Frank was depressingly good at patience for a guy who spent most of his time pushing for the chance to run in and blow stuff up. Asshole. "He was in the infirmary the second time—the time I thought was the first time. He got in a fight, because what's more fun in prison than beating the shit out of a cop? And the fifth or sixth time, the time that it was my fault, he was out for almost a week. Three guys jumped him in the kitchen, tried to take him apart with their bare hands and a paring knife. He broke one's nose and put another in the infirmary with him, but it was three against one. Three guys, and just him on the floor at the end."

"Those are shitty odds. Not your fault, though."

Matt shook his head. "Maybe it wasn't. Maybe it was. He'd been doing better, but somebody found out he working as an informant."

Frank winced. "Yours?" Matt nodded. "He was a grownup, Flannery. He knew what he was in for, what might happen."

"Yeah, well. You think Charlie really thought about that when he agreed? He wanted to help, and it almost got him killed." Matt looked out over the city. Charlie was out there somewhere, probably driving too fast and telling himself he didn't need anything of his own. "It almost got him _killed_ when I fucked up. I got too close."

Frank was silent. Matt wished he would say something. He was so tired of talking, of telling people what they needed to hear, of filling up the spaces in conversations with words that didn't make anyone happy or safe. "I got too close, and I—I didn't know what would happen, I just knew that if he died, it would be my fault. And I didn't want that kind of guilt, couldn't deal with it, so I had him transferred." He looked up, and Frank was watching Matt's hands. He unclenched them, wrapped his fingers around his elbows instead. "I had him put in solitary, because I didn't want his death on my hands. I put him there, and I left him there. I didn't even warn him that it was happening."

"Funny, that's not the way Crews tells it."

"Well, you said it yourself. He's a little crazy. A lot crazy, when it comes to some stuff."

"Not about this. He seemed pretty sure that the only thing you did wrong was walking away. I'm going to skip pointing out the parallels, but only because I'm tired and even you aren't stupid enough to miss them." He tilted his head, and Frank was _really_ spending too much time talking to Charlie, because that was just weird, that gesture on the wrong person. "You know what else he said? That if you save a guy's life, it belongs to you. It's a responsibility, saving lives. Makes you think about whether it's worth saving."

Matt took a step back, wrapped his arms tighter. "He doesn't belong to me."

"You sure about that?" Frank leveled another look at him, but Matt didn't flinch. Much. "Anyway. Worth thinking about. And Seattle's damp and cold. You wouldn't like it. Might as well stay here, face up to whatever it is you're really afraid of. Because that's a nice story you've got, but I don't think it's really the problem." Matt shook his head, but Frank kept going. "I think it's an old story, and you like to think it's the truth. I think you're wrong and I think you probably know that." Frank nodded out at the Los Angeles. "He's out there, waiting. Question is how long he'll wait. Question is whether you want him to wait."

Frank started to walk away, but he turned back. "Oh, and one more thing. If you fuck up again? I'm going to leave you on Reese's doorstep wrapped in duct tape. Because this is not my problem, it's yours, and I'm pretty sure she's better at making people wish they were dead."

Matt stood on the edge of the bluff for a while, thinking.

*

Cheryl called him the morning that Ted got out of prison again. She didn't have any details, but Matt hadn't answered his phone the day before and he wasn't answering now and Charlie didn't ask what that meant, because his mind was already racing ahead to all the places Matt could be, the moments that could have gone wrong. He started making a list in his head, and maybe out loud.

Cheryl interrupted him in between _shot in the head in Roman's basement_ and _held hostage by a crazy British security specialist_.

She didn't know where Matt was headed, but she had a firearms travel request. She didn't say how she got that, and Charlie didn't ask. He just thanked her and told Ted to buckle up.

*

Matt spent the cab ride ignoring all the reasons this was a bad idea. It was a bad idea, everything in him said it was a bad idea, everyone around him said it was a bad idea. It was such a bad idea that he dropped his phone in a trash can on the way in, because it kept ringing with calls from all the people who thought it was a bad idea.

But those people didn't know how hard it was, and they didn't know what it felt like, sitting there and waiting for someone to take away everything that mattered, waiting for the bullet that was going to kill Charlie and leave Matt standing there, wishing it had been the other way around.

*

He had no idea what he'd say when he got there, but Charlie would think of something. He always did. And so when he ran into the terminal and saw Matt walking through the metal detectors, Charlie didn't really think about what would happen if he caught him. He just ran for Matt full tilt and trusted to the universe to work it all out in the end.

*

The last call had been from Charlie, and that was when Matt figured out that he was on his own. Because if Cheryl was willing to give Charlie the number, Matt was the only one who thought he was doing the right thing. Matt was the only one who was looking at the whole picture, and not just this moment.

But balanced against all that was the look on Emily's face when she told him she was leaving. The look on Charlie's when he walked into that diner without any Kevlar, the look that Matt had closed his eyes and seen behind his eyelids. Matt balanced this one decision against the realization that Charlie could lie in ways that Emily never had, not even at the end. Because Charlie always believed he was doing the right thing, and nothing Matt ever said would get through that.

*

The Transportation Safety Administration didn't believe in fate. They didn't believe in second chances, judging by the way they reacted to Charlie cutting through the line without a boarding pass or a bag or anything more than his badge and his gun and his frantic requests to be allowed to get to Matt, just for a minute, because if he didn't Matt was going to get on a plane and Charlie didn't know what came after that. And really, Matt was right there, walking away, if someone could just go tap him on the shoulder or yell his name or something, because he couldn't hear Charlie, but he was _right there_.

It took six hours and three angry phone calls from the LAPD—Tidwell was threatening to suspend him this time, but Reese claimed there was no rider in the union contract for sheer stupidity—plus one from the FBI to get Charlie back out of the tiny room they'd left him in. And he wouldn't be flying the friendly skies for a while, because these days they had a list.

They'd left him in the room because when Charlie heard the last call for boarding, the _now departing_ announcement for the last flight that could possibly have been Matt's, he stopped explaining, stopped trying to get someone, anyone to listen and stop Matt from leaving. Charlie slumped with his forehead against the wall, all the plans gone out of him.

*

Matt walked past the airport security running in the other direction. Whatever the problem was, it wasn't his to solve. Matt was done solving anyone's problems but his own. He put on his headphones and turned up one of the playlists that Charlie had programmed and kept his head down. He didn't look back, not once. Well, maybe the once. But only for a moment, and only because he thought someone yelled his name.

*

Charlie had a lot of time to think, while Tidwell and Cheryl tried to get him out of the airport with all of his belongings and without a cavity search. Mostly he thought about the things he would have said to Matt, if he'd had the chance, and whether he should write them down for later.

He didn't have any paper, or a pen, or his cell phone to type in a note, so it was more of a hypothetical question. But he made a list anyhow, of all the things he would say if he had a chance, beginning with the way that Matt was right, some changes could kill you and those moments, the knowledge that they were coming, broke your heart.

The list ended, though, with two truths that Charlie hadn't found a way to explain. There was no way to avoid the hard parts, because time didn't work that way, no one could see those moments and avoid caring. You couldn't outrun death on a camel or in a car or even on an airplane. You shouldn't want to, that was the whole point.

Maybe Charlie needed to pull out the copy of _The Path to Zen_ that was still in the bottom of his sock drawer—and Charlie had a whole drawer for his socks these days, socks lined up in rows and mixed in with Matt's socks that were thrown together in a heap, and that was the clearest example of not being able to see the future that he could imagine, because back in that cell he'd never seen himself falling in—maybe he needed to pull the book out and take a highlighter to it and give it to Matt, the next time they saw each other.

That was the first thing, the thing with the socks and the book and the motion.

And the second one, the important one, was that not wanting to fall in love didn't mean a damn thing. You couldn't dictate who you loved, it didn't work that way. If it did, it wasn't love at all.

That one, he needed to write down. That one was what he'd start with, when he found Matt again. Even if Charlie had to tie him to a chair to say it.

*

The flight sucked. Flights always sucked, Matt didn't know why he was surprised, but he was. He thought he'd feel relieved, release, finally on his way to somewhere.

He didn't. He felt like he was forgetting an appointment, or like he had lost something. Empty, hollowed out by a year of fighting to stay himself when Charlie was trying to creep into all the spaces and fill him up.

*

Ultimately, the list boiled down to Charlie, sitting in a room staring at the walls, remembering all the ways that Matt was an idiot. But he was Charlie's idiot, whether he wanted to admit it or not. And that meant Charlie was going after him. As soon as he got out of this empty room and made a few phone calls.

*

Matt was done talking. He was done, and so when he hit send on the first message, he did it without thinking too much about why he was sending it, about what Charlie might read into a photo of the baggage carousel, one blue duffel bag sitting on it as it spun around again.

He didn't think, and he didn't add a caption, he just pushed the button on the cheap little disposable phone and let the universe do what it would. It was very zen, and Charlie would probably be a little proud.

*

Charlie didn't know what it meant. It was a code, or a riddle, or maybe a joke that he didn't understand.

Reese didn't understand it either, when he forwarded the photo to her at the station. When he got there she was looking at it and writing notes, but Charlie didn't ask, he just handed her a coffee and sat down, opened his own file, stared at the photo some more.

It still looked the same. There were no words, just an airport.

*

When he showed up at the fugitive retrieval office they gave Matt a desk and a laptop and a file folder full of numbers and case names and people he would be tracking through eight states and further, if necessary.

He spent two hours at the desk before the phone rang and he was assigned a case. Before he left to meet up with his new partner, the agent in charge told him that they'd expect to hear from someone when they caught the guy.

Matt wasn't used to working without a net, but no one here seemed to care.

*

After the first photo, Matt started sending them through email. Charlie had no idea what to do with them—the books weren't all that helpful when it came to trying to follow someone who got on a plane and flew out of your life, because most of them assumed you wouldn't _want_ to—but that was why he had a partner.

"There's no tracking information for where it was uploaded. One of those web-based servers, and Matt's not stupid, he bounced it around a few places first. We can maybe get his FBI people started on tracing it, but I don't think it'll work. There's some encryption, just standard digital watermarking, but knowing the camera doesn't tell us where it was taken. Just when, and so at least he's landed somewhere, even if we don't know where." She looked up, and Charlie tried to make his face into something that conveyed polite interest. "Yeah, you only understood about half of that. You're sure it's him, though?"

Charlie nodded. "It's him. It has to be, he's the only one with my email address. Well, he has it, and you do, and Bobby and Ted and Constance. But none of you would send me an email without any words. And everyone with the LAPD directory has it, but none of them would send me an email at all." Reese rolled her eyes. "Oh, and there are a few other people, girls mostly, but they were from before, before Matt and I—they were from before. They wouldn't email me now." Charlie paused, thought for a moment. "No, it's him. Besides, I don't know anyone else who walked into an airport this weekend, and that's where the first one came from." Reese nodded. "And it's his email address, the one that he uses for ordering—well. You said you didn't want to know about that stuff. I'm sure of it, though."

Reese flipped the file shut she'd been reading. "We know it's him but I really don't want to know why we know that, and we know that he's using an old email address but we don't know where he is. I'm guessing that you want to change that last one."

"Yeah, I do. I need to find him, and I don't think Cheryl is going to help this time. I don't even know if she can."

"So we're on our own, and Matt doesn't want to be found, because if he did he'd have made it a lot easier. I think it's a bad idea, but that's nothing new. And if I don't help, I'm betting you're going to try and find him by yourself." She stood up, and glared down at Charlie. "Still want to do this?"

Charlie stood up, too, so that he was glaring down at Reese. She lifted her chin and narrowed her eyes. Charlie backed off, glanced down to where his hands were turning over the print that he'd stopped to get on the way to the station. "I still want to do this."

"Fine. First, we have a murder to solve. After that, I'll start making some calls. You keep your head here for a few hours, and then I'll help you."

*

Matt was good at the job. Not as good as he was at negotiating, but he could do this, could spend his time chasing down people who didn't want to be found. He was good at working just barely inside the rules, and sometimes a little beyond them. It didn't have quite the appeal of making sure that everyone got out alive at the end of the day, but running after some asshole who ought to be in prison, getting into firefights in unnamed Oklahoma towns, turning someone in and then taking off for the next assignment? Those things had their own good points. There was something to be said for always being on the way to a place you'd never been before.

For a while, he worked with the Border Patrol and it was all photos of sunshine and deserts. Empty roads and tumbled down truck stops. He took pictures of open spaces, because Charlie would like it here. He liked freedom and light and there was a lot of that.

*

Reese was as good as her word. The photos came almost every day, at different times, usually when Charlie was asleep or working or out at dinner or walking in the door. They never arrived when he was sitting in front of Ted's laptop, or—after a few days, when Ted started to get frustrated with all the time Charlie spent refreshing his email program instead of stock options—in front of his own.

Sometimes they would be late, and Charlie would worry until the next morning, when there would be two photos, or even three. He took those as an apology.

Charlie saved them to a folder named _Matt_ that he opened on the third day, and printed them out on the printer Ted brought home—after nine days, without Charlie even asking—and backed them up on the tiny drive that Ted brought home on day eleven, a drive big enough to hold all the photos but small enough that Charlie could carry it around on his keychain, hold them all in his pocket. After he did all that each morning, he forwarded the photos to Reese.

She didn't always say anything, but when Charlie would get in the car she looked at him and he knew that she was still listening. That she would hear him, as soon as he thought of something to say. Until then, he carried the pieces of Matt he still had, held them close and tried to understand what they meant.

*

He would never have had this problem before Charlie. Before Charlie, it never would have occurred to Matt to have this problem. Before Charlie, Matt didn't see a pear and think _home_ and he didn't go to the farm market and need to shake himself back into the present, push himself out of a memory when someone leaned past for an apple. He didn't blink at the realization that it wasn't Charlie reaching, grinning at him in the sunshine, talking about all the different ways that eating apples meant learning something you shouldn't.

Before Charlie, Matt slept in on Sundays, and then he read the paper, and then he ate something fried or maybe covered in dough, or even both if he was feeling really bored and there wasn't a ballgame to watch later. Before Charlie, he didn't get up and go for a run at dawn, and he didn't end up in the grocery store choosing between red grapefruit and regular grapefruit as if there were some real difference. He didn't end up buying both and taking them back to his tiny apartment, where all he had to eat the damn things were regular spoons, not special grapefruit-eating spoons with teeth and magical powers that meant the grapefruit came out looking like fruit and not an unholy mess.

Charlie had special spoons for grapefruit. That would be the difference, the reason that Matt couldn't figure out how to operate a fucking piece of _citrus_ on a Sunday morning, the sort of morning that Charlie would love, a morning when he'd get up at dawn and make Matt a cup of tea and then drag him into the shower, because all the best produce went fast, and they wanted only the best, right? The sort of morning where they'd come home—come back to Charlie's house—and Matt would make coffee, real coffee, coffee that didn't make you want to crawl under a rock and die the way that Charlie's did.

When he finished Charlie would have something sitting out for breakfast. It was always something entirely too healthy but perfect. Charlie thought about stuff like what fruit would taste best when it was sunny out, or when it was raining, or when Matt had just wrapped up a bad negotiation and hadn't been to sleep yet and wanted something sweet to take away the taste of conversations gone wrong.

Matt didn't really want grapefruit anyway. But it was the principle of it that bothered him, because why didn't he know how to do this? He finally cracked and emailed Reese, who sent him back a message within minutes. _He says he always cut the pieces loose first so that it wouldn't make a mess. Where are you?_

Matt closed the computer and threw the grapefruit in the trash. He went and got a doughnut instead, but it tasted terrible.

He sent Charlie a photo of the empty plate where the grapefruit wasn't.

*

He didn't mention the fruit baskets, because the cards were blank and that meant—Charlie didn't know what that meant. The newest ones were lacking in grapefruit, and that made him smile without thinking about it too hard.

*

The DEA didn't give much time for acclimation, and since Matt was on some sort of loan—he didn't ask what sort, because it got him out of LA and kept him out, which was all he asked at this point—that meant he had less than a month before they dropped him into the middle of a major case. He had the details in a file, but he hadn't read the file, not really. He never had time to read the files these days.

That had always been Emily's job, anyway. She was the brains, Matt was the pretty one.

*

Bobby got elected to talk to Charlie after Tidwell called Reese and him in. Charlie thought it was probably because they took the vote when Bobby was out of the room for a minute, because he looked a little anxious and a lot nervous and when Charlie gave up after a few sentences, went back to looking at his melon and pretending to care about the case, Bobby didn't push for details.

But to humor all three of them, Charlie tried to talk to Bobby, about Matt and what he wanted and what Charlie couldn't give him. He tried, and Bobby wanted to help, but somehow whenever Charlie started all he could think of was Matt's face, when he realized that Bobby had been listening and knew about the pineapples. That made it hard to talk.

*

The file, the bits of it he read, didn't give details on where the guy they were looking for might be. He was in the Pacific Northwest, maybe Portland or Vancouver. If he was in Vancouver, he wasn't Matt's problem, but this job rarely worked that smoothly.

If Mills, the guy, the one with eight homicides to his name, third-rung on a methamphetamine ladder, wasn't in Seattle or some other rainy city, he was hanging out in Utah. Matt was hoping for Utah, if only because the weather wasn't quite so shitty.

It had nothing to do with being closer to Charlie for a few days.

*

When Reese left for the FBI task force, it got harder. She didn't have time to look at photos, and when she did they had to talk about them on the phone, which was harder than not talking about them in the car because it required words and Charlie didn't seem to have any words for this. Every morning, when he called Reese and they looked at the new photo together, Charlie got a little more frustrated and a little less patient. Eventually, Ted was bound to notice and Ted was bad at ignoring things he noticed.

Charlie hadn't counted on Ted sneaking into his closet. That was the only way Reese could have found out about the new wall, the wall that had all Matt's photos lined up on it, hanging in rows and columns and whatever patterns Charlie could imagine. Sometimes he took them all down again and put them back up in new shapes, looking for the piece that connected them. Trying to see what Matt was telling him

It wasn't working, but he liked to sit on the floor in front of the wall and just look, running his eyes over all the snapshots of Matt's life that he had, spread out in front of him. That was how Ted found him, in the middle of a Thursday night, thinking about adding new items to the list of things to say when he understood what Matt was trying to find. It had been a few hours, and Charlie looked up to see Ted, standing in the doorway, and maybe he'd missed dinner again but he wasn't hungry so it didn't matter.

The next morning, Reese mentioned that maybe they needed a break from the search, but Charlie ignored her and kept talking.

*

Matt hadn't realized how much of his life revolved around listening to Charlie say things that didn't make any sense. It was too quiet in his head without that underlying refrain of _I have no idea what you're saying but keep talking._

*

Bobby brought in the tapes. They weren't tapes, they were video files, but Charlie still thought of them as tapes and the format didn't matter, because what mattered was that Bobby found them, or he got them in the mail from Emily which was almost the same, and they were tapes of Matt and sometimes of Emily and Charlie watched them all.

Bobby said that they were supposed to help him let go, move on, but Charlie—Charlie had been better at letting go when he didn't have anything he needed to keep.

He watched Matt push and pull and talk, try to convince someone to do the right thing, and Charlie didn't understand.

Bobby just sighed and hit the buttons that made the tapes play and, after three hours, ordered Chinese food and made Charlie eat it.

Charlie agreed to eat so that Bobby would hit play again, but he kept watching the tapes because there was something in them that didn't make sense. A puzzle he couldn't see, even though it was right in front of him.

Only he did. The fourth time, the time when he thought to watch not just Matt but Emily, too, Charlie understood.

After that, he started putting the photos together in different ways, ways that let him see that Matt was gone because he wanted to stay.

*

He didn't have time to think about Charlie. Matt didn't have time to think, period, and Charlie was well down the list of things that he didn't have time to think about.

He still thought about Charlie.

*

Charlie kept forwarding photos, and Reese kept answering the phone, but she also said that she'd talked to Frank, and that Cheryl didn't think it was a good idea, this obsessing over Matt's whereabouts.

It was just that Cheryl wasn't getting pictures in her email. Or maybe she was, Charlie didn't know. He wasn't going to ask, because Cheryl—she scared him a little. Charlie felt like she blamed him, which wasn't completely unfair even if he didn't quite know what he'd done wrong. And Cheryl wasn't the sort of person who blamed someone and then didn't say anything about it, and Charlie couldn't—didn't want to have that conversation.

So he didn't care what Cheryl said about Matt.

He didn't care what Emily said, either. When she called his cell phone he ignored it. When she called the house, he asked Ted to erase the messages. When she called Reese, he found somewhere else he needed to be.

*

They got close. Closer, and Matt knew that it was only going to be a few weeks, maybe even days, and then they'd find Mills and take him down and he could think about Charlie, about calling Charlie and talking to him. About what he might say.

Matt had been thinking, when he hadn't been eating grapefruit and melons and even, one time, a tiny pineapple that he found at the market and carried home and stared at for a long time before he got out a knife.

The more he thought, the more he found himself trying to piece it all together, from that first moment in the infirmary through Charlie's efforts to prove himself by throwing himself at suspects at frequent intervals. Matt drew patterns on bar napkins and connected words together and looked at them when he didn't want to think about how he'd ended up so far away.

He could admit that most of Charlie's stupid decisions were tied to those first few months, the ones when no one wanted him on the force except Reese and Bobby. After that it was habit, or—and Matt only let himself think this on the really long nights, the ones where he sat in a car and watched an empty building in case it turned out not to be empty at all—maybe he was even trying to prove something to Matt. Maybe it was more than he saw at the time.

After the nights that he sat in front of empty buildings, Matt sent two photos. One of the place he was, another of the places he wanted to be.

*

Six weeks after Matt left, Charlie found the first photo that told him anything useful. It was a hotel room, an ordinary room in some city that could be anywhere. The sun was streaming in, and on a chair, in the corner, was a jacket, its sleeve hanging loose, the strings from the hood nearly touching the ground.

Charlie had thought it was lost. Maybe not. Maybe nothing was ever lost completely. There were just days when things—and people—weren't within reach. But it wasn't the same as being lost, not if you knew where to look.

*

Matt tried not to think about the photos, and he never looked at the old ones, the ones he'd already sent, lined up in rows in a folder without a name, only dates in a row. Once they were gone, they were gone. He couldn't get them back.

But he saved them in a folder, just in case he was wrong.

*

He didn't listen to what Emily said, when she showed up at his door one evening and asked him to stop. He didn't ask why she came, or who sent her, or what she wanted. Emily had given up on Matt a long time ago, and Charlie—she started to say something about the hospital, and Charlie shut the door in her face.

He didn't want to know about Matt and Emily and the hospital. It didn't mean anything, wasn't real.

*

Matt needed a break. If he didn't get a break, a few hours to get away from this whole case and everything that he wasn't thinking about until the end of it, he was going to lose his mind and he wouldn't be any good at his job.

That's how he ended up in a redneck bar in Ellsinore, Utah, nursing a beer and watching to see who else was in the bar alone, who might want to take him up on—whatever it was he was really looking for here. There was a nice enough woman in the corner, blonde and drinking something pink with an umbrella. She kept looking at him, and Matt looked back, thought about all the ways this could end.

A conversation, a kiss, sex in an alley out back—and that was where he lost it, for a minute, because alleys meant Charlie and sex meant Charlie, even now, and suddenly Matt wasn't thirsty anymore, he just wanted to go back to the hotel and be invisible.

He wanted to go home, but he couldn't, not until this ended. Not until he knew what was going to happen next. Instead, Matt set his camera on the bar and tried to get a picture of the woman in the corner, because she looked lonely, too. When he pushed the button, though, all that came clear was his other hand, curled around the beer bottle, dirt left under his fingernails from sifting through bags of evidence.

*

Charlie drove around for a few hours after Emily left, not really going anywhere or planning to stop until he decided what to do with Emily at his door, with the words she hadn't said about the things Matt hadn't done. Or maybe that he had, and Charlie wasn't sure whether he cared which it was.

It took hours, but by the time he pulled back into the driveway, he'd made up his mind. He wasn't waiting on any more photos. If Matt wanted something from him, he'd need to ask.

As soon as he'd decided, Charlie knew it was a mistake. But he was going to pack up all the photos anyway, back into their envelopes and into the box and from there, he'd put them into the trash or recycle them or burn them in the backyard. One of those things.

It took longer than he expected to pack everything up, and he got distracted by little moments—by the edge of Matt's jacket sleeve, leather worn shiny. By a shadow that must be Matt, falling over the corner of a photo of a park bench. By all the spaces in all the photos where he could almost see all the answers.

By the time he finished, Charlie didn't know what he wanted. But he gave himself one more time, one more hour of thinking about Matt, before he put it all away.

***

_In every life, there's a moment or two.  
In every life, a room somewhere, by the sea or  
in the mountains._

**Louise Glück, "Presque Isle"**

*

The hotel room was freezing, it always was when he came back, and Matt had left his laptop on the coffee table but he didn't open it yet. Instead he dropped his jacket on the desk, flipped off the air conditioner, and reached for the remote.

There was never anything on television this late, nothing but infomercials—he never saw any for that gym these days, the one that Charlie had been investigating last fall—and reruns of shows that he hadn't liked the first time. Matt thought about buying some porn, but it was a government rate and he didn't feel like explaining the itemizing. Accountants used a lot of red pen for stuff they didn't want to know about.

He flipped off the television and opened his computer, plugged the card in and opened up his email. He'd send Charlie's photo and maybe have another beer, try to get some sleep.

*

Charlie checked his computer once more, not because he thought there would be anything there, but because it was habit, it was the thing he did right before he tried to sleep. As he watched, the thing that held his mail started to bounce. That meant—Charlie vaguely remembered being told what that meant, but he hadn't been listening and so he clicked on the button instead of going to find the manual again.

What opened was a photo of Matt, of Matt's hand—Charlie knew that hand, recognized the scar above the knuckle and the half-frayed cuff of his favorite shirt—wrapped around a bottle of Matt's favorite beer. The bar was blurry and dark, but Matt was clear.

After that night in the alley, Charlie hadn't been able to—he'd stayed home a lot. Matt had gone out after work a few times and at first he'd tried to call and ask Charlie along, but Charlie always had a case to solve even when he didn't. He didn't answer the phone and eventually Matt stopped calling. The hadn't talked about why, because Matt was waiting for Charlie to explain and Charlie didn't want to talk. Not about that.

And after that, when Charlie had gone to Matt's house and invited himself in, they'd rarely made it as far as the kitchen and never gone out for a drink.

*

Matt flipped off the light and went to bed. And then he kicked the blankets off, and closed his eyes again. When that didn't work, he turned over his pillow and curled on his side and it still wasn't the same. Matt hadn't thought for almost seven weeks about sleeping in the same bed as Charlie and he wasn't going to start now.

Only he was, and this was not going to be one of the good nights, the ones where he was too exhausted to remember falling asleep. This was one of the others. The long ones.

Matt dropped the pillow over his face and called the universe names but it didn't help.

*

He tried to walk away but the thing about letting go was—he hadn't had to concentrate this hard on relinquishing anything before, hadn't needed to talk himself into it. Charlie tried not to see it as anything more than a new challenge. He started again.

The thing about letting go was that it only worked if you allowed the thoughts to come, to fill your brain and then fade away. So thinking about Matt, about his hands wrapped around any number of things that weren't a beer, was exactly what Charlie needed to do. It was therapeutic.

It helped to think that he was meditating, not obsessing. Sometimes Charlie had a hard time recognizing the difference. So he left the picture open on the screen, and Charlie closed his eyes and let himself think about things that really shouldn't matter anymore, not if he was ready to move on and leave them behind.

He didn't think about the months after that night, the times that he knocked and Matt answered, let him in and didn't ask any questions. The times that Charlie didn't tell him why, or ask to stay, or make it into anything more than what it was. The space they gave each other and how cold it was.

What Charlie thought about, the thoughts that he tried to accept and watch circle around the whole history of the ways that he and Matt had missed each other, was that one night, the night that Matt figured it out but didn't understand what it meant. He thought about the look on Matt's face when he realized that it had started so much earlier than he knew. That was the night Charlie wanted back, the one where he hadn't known how to say the things that they needed to say. The night before it all fell apart.

*

He needed more beer, or pills, or someone to come along and hit him over the head with a tire iron. Anything to flip Matt's brain over from racing and wondering and thinking, which was really the most annoying thing ever, to that hazy moment when he could finally close his eyes and open them again far too early in the morning. The sort of feeling that he had after he and Charlie—no, that was off-limits, one of the things that Matt wasn't thinking about.

Except they were going after Mills in the morning, and he needed to sleep. And so maybe, maybe just this once, Matt could let those thoughts stay and do something about them, and then he'd be able to doze off without another drink.

It was _entirely_ because he needed to do his job that Matt let himself think about Charlie, that first day, running off with that weird graceful sprint that he had. It was because he needed to wake up in the morning that he thought of Charlie in the pool that first night, Charlie's skin hot under his hands, and of opening his eyes as they hit the water and the sting of chlorine.

*

This time, Charlie rewrote the memory into something different, something that didn't smell of bleach and pain and other people. He made himself think about just one moment, just the scrape of brick through the cotton of his shirt, of Matt, hot up against his back, Matt's fingers wound through his, Matt breathing questions and encouragement into his ear in a chant, a mantra, a prayer.

He closed his eyes and tried to remember what it had felt like, the things he missed. The brush of Matt's lips over the back of his neck, the sting of teeth, chill wind across the base of his spine as Matt leaned away for a second, fumbled in a pocket. The sharp twist of Matt's fingers in him. The hesitation, Matt waiting until Charlie nodded to push inside, to go further. Matt's gasp as he did, tensing behind Charlie and holding back a moan. Matt's hand on his dick, the rasp of the wall as Charlie's hands started to slip, as Matt started to move.

*

He honestly couldn't remember much of what happened once they hit the water. Charlie's hands on his arms, wrapped over and holding on, leaving bruises that Matt wouldn't find until the next morning. He knew that they'd gone under, the cold making Matt flinch and start to choke but then Charlie had wrapped his leg around Matt's thighs and pulled them closer together, up against the side of the pool where Matt could hang on to something solid. Charlie had pulled until Matt could feel the heat of Charlie's skin against his, everywhere the water wasn't.

And for the rest, the parts he couldn't remember, Matt figured just this once he could lie to himself because his libido didn't care and it was late and he had plenty of memories to work from. So he pictured Charlie, eyes open as he slid one hand between their bodies, watching Matt's face, looking him in the eye. He ignored the flash of memory, of Charlie fumbling for a second, the knowledge that neither of them had done this in a while. He ignored that Charlie had looked faintly frustrated at his own clumsiness. Instead Matt concentrated on the feeling of Charlie's fingers wrapped around his dick, of calluses scratching pain-pleasure as Charlie grinned, found a rhythm that made Matt's arms shake, that made his grip slide on the edge of the pool until he grabbed at Charlie for support.

And when they went under again, this time Charlie took a breath first, he must have, because as Matt started to gasp, as he tensed and came, Charlie was there breathing for both of them, keeping them afloat.

*

Charlie stopped there, held on to that moment until it came clear, and opened his eyes and shook himself out of everything that came after. It was then that he remembered what the icon had meant. That the picture had just arrived, that at that very moment Matt was somewhere else, clicking the button that made things appear on Charlie's computer. Matt was out there, in this same moment, and Charlie had a camera around here somewhere, he knew he did, he needed to find the camera. Ted had left it—there. Under the desk, and Charlie pulled it out and _thank fuck_, Ted was really truly obsessive about these things because when he pushed the button everything lit up and it still looked like a camera, so Charlie pointed it at the door, half-opened into the hallway, and he pushed the button.

It took a few minutes to find the pieces that made the camera send things to the computer, but Charlie was smarter than a piece of technology and he hit send with only a few muttered profanities and two broken pencils. And then he waited patiently for a few seconds, before he stood up and started straightening the room, pulling the covers up on the bed and throwing his socks into the hamper. He was contemplating getting out the vacuum when the computer made a noise and he tripped over a shoe and landed heavily on the edge of the chair next to the desk.

*

Matt was just drifting off when his laptop screen lit up with a message received. He tried to close his eyes and ignore it, but the more he thought about other things the more he knew that the only way to fall asleep was to roll himself out of bed and close the lid.

But the return address and fifteen years of being a cop, of asking questions, even if most of those years were spent doing more convincing than detecting, stopped him.

And once he opened the file, Matt was awake. Because he'd been so careful, worked so hard to avoid this moment, the one where he'd either need to walk away or answer.

He didn't let himself think about all the questions that open doorways brought, or about the promises they made. Matt pushed them under and grabbed his camera, focused it out the window at the lights of wherever-the-hell he was.

*

Charlie had no idea what the photo even contained—it was tilted and dark and those might be lights, or they might be dirt. It didn't matter, it was _there_ and that was all he wanted. It was a conversation, and next he needed something plainer, something that was an echo, a question, a—he grabbed the camera and ran downstairs, into the kitchen and there on the counter was the latest basket. It was almost empty, because he didn't buy fruit these days, just ate what Matt sent him.

It was a start.

*

Matt wanted to walk away. He did. He closed the laptop and he got a glass of water and then he went down to the ice machine and got some ice because the water wasn't cold enough and it tasted like chlorine and minor chords.

The front desk clerk didn't look overly impressed when Matt walked in, barefoot and with an ice bucket held in front of his boxers. She rolled her eyes and popped her gum and gave him a keycard without listening to his explanation, because it wasn't as if this sort of thing didn't happen all the time. Guys accidentally locked themselves out of their motel rooms wearing only a faded hoodie and a pair of green boxers with yin-yang symbols and someone else's name on them all the time.

He'd been gone twenty minutes, and Matt almost went back to bed but now he really was awake. So he checked instead, and there was a blurry photo of a fruit basket. He'd hoped he was more subtle than that, but apparently not.

*

Charlie peeled an orange while he waited. Then he felt ridiculous, pretending to eat an orange in the middle of the night while his fingers twitched to check to see if Matt had replied, so he put the orange in the fridge and grabbed the laptop from his desk and walked out to the pool, sat on the edge with his feet in the water and the laptop on the ground next to him. When that got boring, he leaned back, concrete cool and sharp under his shoulders, the sky dark and moonless. It was a warm night, and he wondered if it was warm where Matt was. If he had enough socks, and was getting enough sleep, and if he woke up in the morning curled onto only one side of the bed the way that Charlie did sometimes.

He took a few pictures of the pool, and one of the place where they hadn't built a fence. He started to take pictures of the house, but they all looked shaky and wrong and he found the delete button and started over, this time with the lights laid out in rows and then the surface of the water, tiny waves flashing in the lights from the living room.

His skin was beginning to wrinkle before Matt replied. And when he did, Charlie had no idea what he was trying to say with a picture of a hotel keycard and an ice bucket. Still, he added the only photo of the pool that turned out clearly, the one that had the edge of his knee and the tiniest piece of the tattoo that ended just above it, to an empty message and hit the button.

*

Matt hadn't been thinking about Charlie's tattoos, he'd been careful not to think about them and the way the ink vanished and reappeared under his hands when he ran his fingers over Charlie's back, down his thigh.

They were all he could think about now. Lines and whorls and angles, the permanence of scars and ink, freckles on Charlie's skin and the silver of old wounds and new designs. He didn't have anything that compared, and Charlie wouldn't understand the reference, but Matt wasn't sure that the content was the point.

*

The photo he got back was an old one, it must have been something Matt kept because the sun was shining and Charlie recognized the sagebrush and telephone poles from one of the first emails, the one Reese had sent to her friend Wendy who hadn't been any help. This photo was different, though, because next to the highway, hanging over the cracked pavement, was a bright green sign that read _Los Angeles 400 miles_.

*

Charlie's reply took only a few seconds, a photo of LA, streets gridded with lights and the streaks of cars. Matt felt the old curl of guilt start beneath his ribs. He dragged himself into the bathroom and held the camera out toward the mirror and blinked through the flash, tried it again and got something that made him look like an angry vagrant, but he didn't want Charlie forgetting just what he was asking for.

And with that done, Matt forced himself to close the laptop and unplug it and go back to bed, because the last thing he needed was to go into a raid on two hours of sleep and three beers from the night before.

It took a long time, but he finally dozed off sometime between thinking about the look on Charlie's face the day Matt surprised him with a bag of apples and tickets to a Cubs game and the night that they stayed up with a case of clementines to watch the sunrise over the city from Charlie's backyard.

*

He had just settled back onto the bed when the icon started bouncing again. Charlie didn't know what to expect, but when he clicked there was Matt, looking like he hadn't been taking care of himself, like he did when he spent too much time worrying about Charlie and not enough about shaving or eating right or sleeping in on weekends.

He was also wearing a familiar jacket, and Charlie found himself grinning for no reason at all. He let Matt have the last word.

*

For the first time in a month, Matt didn't wake up from a nightmare.

*

The next day, Ted tried to talk to him about the stack of prints on the table, duplicates and enlargements and new images mixed together, but Charlie didn't have time for that. He had things to arrange, starting with all those damn pictures.

First, though, he needed to talk to Reese, and then he needed to do his job, convince his temporary partner that he wasn't distracted by anything or anyone because Seever wasn't going to like it when he left to bring Matt home.

Charlie missed having Bobby as a partner, because Bobby hadn't needed any explanations. Bobby knew that Matt came first, and Seever—Seever had never even met Matt, and Charlie didn't know how to describe him to someone without any reference points. So he didn't. Instead, he solved a murder and saved his thinking for the moments when Seever wasn't talking about anything he needed to hear. Sometimes it got a bit awkward, but she didn't seem to notice anything strange in the responses he gave.

Having a reputation as a crazy person was more useful than he expected.

*

It took a couple of extra days, but Matt and the DEA chick, a woman who looked a little like Emily in the wrong light which Matt ignored so he could do his job, finally got a lead that panned out. He'd been so busy that he'd missed sending another photo, but Matt was counting on Charlie's inability to leave a mystery unsolved to carry him through until he thought of a good way to apologize.

Things were going fine, Mills was almost in custody and Matt was thinking ahead, making plans for phone calls or maybe for just showing up on Charlie's doorstep, reversing their roles a little. That was where things started to break open. That was when the shooting started, and the next thing he knew, he was stuck in a house with three people he couldn't trust and two more who wanted him dead.

This was not the best situation he'd ever been in. It wasn't the worst, but it definitely wasn't where he wanted to be right now.

*

Charlie was patient. He waited three days, only checked his email ten or fifteen times a day—the rest of the time, he let the automatic program do the work for him—and didn't call the number he stole from Dani's phone. But three days was a long time, nearly a week if you didn't count weekends, and when he did finally call, the number was disconnected and that was when Charlie got a little worried. He'd assumed that someone could reach Matt, but maybe not, maybe no one could, and that was—not what he'd expected. That was when he got the photos back out and laid them in lines and started thinking in earnest about what he needed to do next.

A few hours later, Reese showed up and Charlie answered her, told her what he was doing, that he wanted to see it all, the whole picture. She stared at him a few minutes and then shook her head and walked away.

Charlie figured that he had about an hour before she finished talking to Tidwell and Ted and Bobby and maybe even Cheryl, depending on how worried she was. It only took him another fifteen minutes to remember the keycard, and from there it was simple. The photo with the keycard was in the folder, and the folder was copied on the keychain in his pocket. The keycard listed the name of the motel.

The name of the motel gave him the name of the town and an address that was only a few days old.

Three days was nothing. He could trace Matt from there without anyone's help, as long as Matt wasn't trying to be subtle. And after the last photo, the one that Reese hadn't seen, the one in the mirror staring back at Charlie, he didn't think subtle was the point this time. He took that photo with him, and left the rest in a pile on his desk.

*

Matt's phone didn't work—again—and he didn't know who to call anyhow. It wasn't as if he could just dial up Charlie and tell him _hey, got a little delayed in a shootout, don't suppose you could call my old boss and have her send out a team to save my ass?_

Still the DEA kept tabs on its agents even if no one was looking for Matt. Someone was bound to notice that there was a problem eventually.

*

He called Frank once he got on the road, because if something was wrong—and it was, he could feel it—Charlie might need more people after all. He called Reese, too, but she didn't answer her phone right away and when she called back she sounded annoyed. Still, Charlie told her he was on his way to Nevada and he'd phone again when he knew what came next.

He spent most of the drive getting updates from Frank on Matt's recent cases. The more he heard, the more frustrated Charlie became. No one had told him this, no one had explained what it was Matt had gone to _do_, and this—this was a stupid thing to do. This was a job that got people killed, and the next time he saw Matt he would—

Charlie took a deep breath and kept driving.

*

This was not going well. Three people who wanted him dead, one dead DEA agent, one dead bad guy, and that left Matt and the woman who was, unbelievably, more annoying than Emily at her worst. He put up a fight, but there really weren't that many ways it could end.

*

As Charlie pulled up to the ramshackle house that some local teenagers said had been full of people and guns that morning, his phone rang. Frank was on the other end. "Emily's almost there. She was closest, the rest of the team is on the way. Answer your phone, she needs to know what's going on. And don't be an idiot, wait for backup."

Charlie made a noise that might have been agreement, but might not.

"I mean it, Crews, if I find out you didn't, I'm going to personally take the time to kick your ass. And that's nothing compared to what Reese and Flannery will do to you when I'm done. You go in there alone, and I'm going to make sure you wish you'd never gotten out of the hospital."

Charlie's phone started to beep. He'd never been relieved to see Emily's name flash on the screen before.

Emily sounded worried, but Charlie didn't know if she was worried about Matt, or if that was just how she sounded after any conversation with Frank.

He gave her a quick description of the house and the neighborhood and then he settled back in his car to wait. She was only a few minutes away, and he took the chance to thank the universe for people who were as stubborn as Matt, even the ones Charlie didn't like. When the local police showed up, sirens and lights spinning, he was still trying to imagine what he'd say to Matt when this all turned out fine.

*

Matt was looking for a way out of the building, knees pulled up in front of him and his arms wrapped around his legs—trying to look non-threatening—when Emily's voice echoed through the air.

It just figured that he'd be in a mess when he saw her again. Somewhere, karma was laughing at him, and he'd bet that it wasn't done with him yet. Still, Matt trusted Emily to do her job, and if he had to be in the middle of a hostage situation, she was the second person he would have called.

The first, he hoped, was as far away as possible. Maybe on a beach somewhere, sipping a drink and avoiding the sun. Eating fruit and talking to girls in bikinis about the meaning of hedonism.

Matt chased away that thought, and went back to figuring out a way to get himself an earpiece from a dead guy on the floor.

*

Charlie didn't have anything useful to say, but he listened to Emily trying to bargain for Matt's life. He was helpless, nothing he could ask or claim or argue, no one to threaten or cause pain. All he could do was this, was listen to the world come apart.

This was probably how Matt felt before he left, which—Charlie ought to make that up to him somehow, if he ever got the chance. That was the first things he'd do, and the second—Charlie didn't get to the second thing, because Emily's voice had shifted upward, and that meant a change was about to happen. Charlie opened his eyes, stopped tapping his fingers together and concentrated on the words. Watched Emily do her job.

She'd switched to a cell phone, but Charlie listened in on a purloined earpiece. The FBI always had a lot of extras lying around. It hadn't been that difficult to borrow one from an unwatched box of equipment.

Emily was ignoring everyone but the guy, Mills, the one who maybe had Matt in there with a gun to his head. "I'm going to need some proof that the hostage is still okay. You have to give me something, let me talk to him or—evidence that he's still fine, that he's not hurt. What can you give me? I need something that I can take to his—" she glanced at Charlie, started again. "I need something that I can check with his family about."

Mills muffled the headset, mumbled something Charlie didn't catch. In a few seconds, he was back. "You can't talk to him, but he says to tell you to call Detective Charlie Crews, get him on the phone. He says to say to him, _tell me what changed so that I can believe you_. Plus he wants his car back, said not to fill it full of holes this time. And there was something about pineapples, but I don't understand it. Guy doesn't like citrus or something. You want me to get him to repeat it? I gotta tell you, I don't think this guy is playing with a full deck. He won't shut up and he doesn't make any sense."

Charlie slumped onto the back of a car, shaking his head, trying to agree but failing because this was _Matt_, it had to be, this was Matt repeating himself because he knew that they might not—he wasn't going to—Charlie leaned over and braced himself against the bumper, because he might need to pass out for a second. He didn't look up when he felt Frank step closer to him, rest a hand on his shoulder. Somewhere far away, Emily was still talking. "No, that's good, that's enough. We'll call this Charlie person and as soon as I confirm it, we can talk about what happens next. I'm going to need you to stay on the line while we—" The earpiece clicked silent.

Charlie heard Emily took a deep breath.

He wrapped himself tighter, trying not to think about the branching of possibilities and realities. Trying to regain momentum.

*

Matt hoped it had been enough. He didn't think about how Charlie would take the phone call, just hoped that he would remember. That he'd hear the message, that Matt had been trying, that he'd been coming home. That he hadn't expected this end and he didn't mind, not this time.

*

The world around him was speeding up, slipping past Charlie as he stood and watched the moments pass. There was too much to track, too many places that Matt could have gone instead and too many people that he could have become, too many places that were better than this.

Charlie tried to breathe, but it wasn't working, he was still losing the thread and he could see the whole thing teetering, edging toward collapse. He thought this must be what it was like to give up, and it wasn't a good feeling. It was the feeling of the universe going quiet, and Charlie was just tired enough to wish for it, just for a second, just long enough to relax. He closed his eyes, but as he did, he doubled over in a flash of surprised pain. Purple and red and white and fuck, that _hurt_. The punch that followed it was worse, and Charlie shook his head to clear the green shine of what might be a broken nose.

When he opened his eyes, shocked, Frank was in his face. "Don't you check out now, Crews. Don't you dare let this go. You want to focus? Let's focus." And then he took another swing, this time to Charlie's jaw, but he telegraphed his move and Charlie caught his fist, held on as he turned and levered Frank into a wall as hard as he could. Frank slid his leg between Charlie's and grinned at him, right before he hooked his foot behind Charlie's ankle and knocked him flat.

Charlie scrambled back to his feet, anger sparking in his shoulders as he ran at Frank, tackled him into the wall and grabbed at Frank's wrist, twisted it back and swung his elbow forward into Frank's kidney. Frank swore and curled away, but Charlie held on, tightened his grip until he could feel the bones grind tight together.

Frank finally tensed and broke Charlie's grip, but before he could reverse their positions Charlie had an arm up across Frank's neck, holding him still. His fingers twitched for his knife, but instead he just glared, finally relaxing a fraction when Frank leaned his head back against the wall and started chuckling quietly. Charlie let his arms fall to his sides, but he didn't step away, not yet. He didn't shake out the tension in his fingers.

Frank narrowed his eyes and threw his head forward, and pain flared again as he crunched into Charlie's face, as they fell into the grass and collapsed into separate piles. Charlie lay there for a few minutes, staring at the sky and running his fingers over his nose. He didn't think it was broken after all, although he was going to have to throw away this shirt. That much blood wouldn't come out in the wash, it never did. When Charlie turned his head away from the sun, Frank was sitting up, poking carefully at his wrist.

Frank looked up. "You back in the game?"

Charlie stared at him, unsure if he was feeling respect or terror for Frank's bizarre version of a pep talk. "You're sure you never served time? Not even a little? Matt always said you scared him, but I thought he was exaggerating." He straightened his knee, winced a little. That was going to hurt in the morning. "That's a nice move, with the leg sweep."

Frank nodded. "Yeah, well. I do what needs doing. What's next?"

Charlie grimaced. "If I say I have no idea, are you going to hit me again?

*

Matt was out of ideas, Either Emily figured it out, or she didn't. Either way, he'd thrown her what he could, and from here it was all about connecting with the HT.

Not that Matt wanted to connect with Mills, who was currently waving around a machete and talking about the overthrow of organized government in a way that probably meant he wasn't listening all that closely to whatever Emily was saying on the other end of the phone. But he wasn't about to go down without a fight.

*

Charlie was standing in the background, trying to stay out of the way and waiting for his nose to stop bleeding, when it clicked together. Matt hadn't just been quoting Charlie, he wasn't just—he had been quoting _Emily_, what she'd said when the HT asked for a car the first time. Matt could hear Emily, and that meant—

Charlie jogged over to Cheryl. "You need to find it, the channel Matt's on." Cheryl looked at him like he was crazy. Which, maybe he was, but not about this.

"He can hear us. Matt heard Emily, that's what he was trying to say. He heard her negotiating even after she switched to the phone, he can _hear_ us, and that means he's got a radio, a headset, something. Find the channel and get me a microphone. I have to—we have to try it."

She was shaking her head, but Charlie kept talking. "Cheryl, please. I'm right, I know I am, and he's in there and he doesn't know if it got through, if someone figured it out. He doesn't know that we know, he doesn't—I have to talk to him. Someone has to, but I'm the only one who doesn't already have a job, right? I'm just standing around and I could—we could—do something." Charlie looked her in the eye and tried to stay calm.

Cheryl frowned and turned away, but Frank was already yelling for Leah and a headset. Charlie could have kissed him just then.

*

Matt didn't know what he expected to happen, but a few minutes later, he heard Charlie's voice.

He'd never hallucinated before. He supposed there were worse things for his brain to give him when he finally lost his mind than Charlie's beliefs about the meaning of accessories and furniture placement. And then Charlie started saying random fucking shit that made no sense. Matt decided that a real hallucination wouldn't be quite so frustrating, but he closed his eyes and he waited for Charlie to run out of words.

*

They gave him a headset and stuck him in a chair and Charlie hesitated, took a breath, and then he started telling stories. He couldn't hear Matt's reply, but he felt it, felt the universe pause for a moment before it started up again.

It was possible that he imagined that part. But Charlie wanted to believe that this meant something outside his own head. That Matt was listening, and that meant he was still there.

Charlie kept talking, ridiculous things, moments that he remembered after he finished the list and ran out of the sentences he'd planned to say. He talked about the first time he saw Matt. About hearing Matt say his name from the side of an infirmary bed, about that first phone call after he rejoined the force, the one that started it back up again. About the extra set of keys he made, the ones sitting in his glove box, the ones without Matt's name on them that weren't for anyone else, either.

*

It was a little like being inside Charlie's head, or what Charlie's head was like when he was thinking of Matt. Matt didn't know if he was grateful for the distraction, or pissed that Charlie waited until he couldn't answer to say shit like this. A little of both, but mostly it was relief, like coming up for air or walking through a door.

And then somebody grabbed Matt by the arm and dragged him forward, and Charlie's voice was gone because the earpiece was on the floor and Matt was—well, this was going to be close.

*

Charlie told Matt that he couldn't find a shop in the city that made the right coffee while he strapped on his vest and emptied his pockets.

*

Matt started saying everything that might get through to Mills, some of it completely pointless, because the more he talked the longer they would take to kill him. He hoped. Whatever, he was on his knees and there was a guy with a machete and he was going for broke.

*

He talked about the cases Matt had missed while he checked the magazine and took the safety off the pistol Frank gave him. Still no answer, but Charlie wasn't expecting one.

*

Hopefully Emily had figured out that things were going bad, because Matt was running out of arguments. Hopefully Charlie wasn't going in with the first squad, because Matt didn't want Charlie seeing the way he—seeing Matt after he ran out of things to keep himself alive. That wasn't a good idea.

*

He talked about driving, about getting his car back, about whatever came into his head, because it had been _months_ and Matt was there, was within shouting distance but Charlie couldn't shout, all he could do was talk into this quiet channel while he nodded at Frank and got into position to go in.

*

Matt told Mills about Charlie, a little. About how Charlie seemed crazy but he wasn't, he was just doing what he needed to do. About the lines he crossed, and how Matt tried to be there but sometimes Charlie was on his own, all alone on the other side of some murky area, trying to find a way back. About how important it was not to lose the line between the right things and the things that were easy.

*

He didn't know what he said, when they started to surround the house and he had to lower his voice to a whisper, but he hoped Matt was still listening.

*

Matt finally gave up when Mills hung up on Emily and threw the phone out the window. That was the end, this was it, it was done. He closed his eyes.

*

When the shooting started, Charlie told Matt he was coming to get him. This time he meant it.

*

When the shooting started, it was easier to be calm if you were holding a gun.

*

Charlie headed straight for Matt, checking doorways but always listening for Matt's voice, because wherever he was, Matt would still be talking right up until the clock stopped. And when he heard it, heard Matt filling in spaces with words and thoughts and that rambling cadence he had when he was really worried, when he knew that what he was saying didn't work, he stopped checking for what was ahead and just ran.

At the end, there was Matt on his knees, head bent and Charlie was so angry, so furious at the universe that put him there, that he didn't even think to warn the man standing over Matt. He just fired, and watched as the machete clanged to the floor next to Matt's leg.

*

Matt opened his eyes when Frank called out for status reports, lifted his head and Charlie was standing there in the doorway, gun out and pointed at the space where Mills had been a moment before.

Matt hadn't ever seen that expression. Like Charlie didn't care what happened next, as long as—like he'd been living for this instant, and now he didn't know what to do, how to take another step.

*

A heartbeat, an eternity later, Matt looked up, and Charlie didn't know what to say. He didn't have any idea how to respond to the look on Matt's face. When Frank ran in, took stock of the scene, and started pointing out all the ways that they were idiots and could have gotten themselves killed, it was almost a relief.

*

Matt didn't see Charlie leave; he just turned back after Frank smacked him on the shoulder and the doorway was empty. He picked up his gun and followed the hallway out, blinking a little at the flash of cruisers and streetlights.

They'd really called out the cavalry on this, and Matt hesitated in front of the house, searching for Charlie. He found Emily waiting for something. Matt thought it was a pretty safe bet that he was at least in the running, because she was frowning and trying to pretend that she wasn't watching the door.

*

Charlie couldn't stay, didn't want to find out whether he'd been right, and Matt was safe, he was alive and he was safe and Charlie didn't know how he got back outside but he was standing in a neighboring yard, leaning against a tree, when Matt came out. Charlie took a few steps forward, but Matt didn't notice him. Matt only saw Emily.

*

He stood close enough that he wouldn't need to shout over the sirens. "So, you were pretty good at that. You should think of turning pro."

Emily shrugged. "It's my job. It's what I do. It's what you do, too." Matt looked past her into the dark. "Matt, it's what you do. Not this, chasing people and getting hurt," she reached for his arm, but Matt shook her hand off, "and running away from everyone who cares."

Matt stuck his hands in his pockets. "This is what I wanted." He shrugged. "I may have been wrong about that."

Emily bit her lip. "Maybe. Did you talk to him yet?" And that was what Matt had loved about her. She was smarter than him, and frequently a pain in the ass, but Emily didn't waste her time pretending that things weren't true.

"Not yet. I just—thanks. I wanted to say thanks." Matt stepped in, gave Emily a quick hug, and just as he was turning to search for Charlie, Frank walked over and sent him to debrief.

*

When Matt walked back to the trailer with Frank, Charlie didn't have anything else to do. And so he left.

*

Dani was waiting in the back of a van, kicking her heels. She was talking quietly to some woman in an FBI windbreaker that Matt didn't recognize. "Dani, where's Charlie? I saw him earlier, he was on the tactical team because he's a complete—never mind. I can't find him."

"Now you think to look? It's a little late, he's already gone. You missed him." Dani kept her head turned, rubbing her wrist below the sleeve of her jacket.

"What in the—what are you talking about? I just got done with the DEA guys, this is the first I've been able to—where is he? Why didn't he come to the debriefing? They'd have let him sit in while I talked. It's not like I had anything interesting to tell."

Danie shrugged. "He didn't think you wanted him there." She looked up. "What were you talking to Emily about? Right after?"

"I was thanking her. That's a tough job, primary on a negotiation when you know one of the hostages. Wanted to catch her before she left."

"So you were just saying goodbye?" Matt nodded, and Dani blew out a breath. "That's what I told him. Not that he listened."

"I wanted to ask how she got assigned the case, but I was trying to get done faster, so that Charlie wouldn't have to—well, I thought he might wait for me, but I guess he needed to—hang on." Matt looked at Dani, who was studying the scuff marks on her shoes. "Dani? When did Charlie leave, exactly? And how did you guys get pulled in? This is _way_ out of your territory." She looked out at the distance, back to her feet, at the ceiling of the van. Anywhere but at him. Matt had a bad feeling about this. "Why are you here?"

She smiled like he'd told a bad joke. "Charlie was already here. He called us, when he found the house. Once he was positive something was wrong."

Matt couldn't—Charlie had been there the whole time. Charlie had followed him, somehow. Of course he had, Charlie never gave up when he wanted—that explained a lot.

"He called Frank when he figured it out, Frank called everyone on the planet. It snowballed from that. You guys really know how to turn a spat into a three ring circus."

Shit. Of all the times for Charlie to _stop_ talking. "Dani, when did he leave? Where did he—when did he leave?"

"About two minutes after you walked away with Frank. I really do want to knock your heads together sometimes. You couldn't have taken ten seconds to tell him to wait for you?"

"I didn't know where he went. I was looking for him, I just saw Emily first."

"That was probably one of your more boneheaded moves." Dani sighed. "He took off about an hour ago. Go on, I'll let everyone know why you disappeared. I left the keys in the car. Just don't set it on fire or run it off a cliff or do _anything_ that would have to be explained to the department." Matt was already running for the car when she called out again. "I mean it! He's headed back to LA. Don't fuck this up any worse. And they don't like it when I return the car with bloodstains."

*

Charlie would get past this. He would get past it, and then there would be another moment, one where nothing hurt quite so much. There would be moments, millions of them, where he didn't keep repeating the sight of Matt and Emily, facing each other on a sidewalk. Of Emily, who had gotten Matt out, done all the work, when all Charlie had done was distract him. Gotten inside too late to do any more than clean up the mess.

He was driving toward moments when he didn't pause, didn't see Matt looking at Emily and not looking at Charlie. Not noticing Charlie watching them.

Right now he saw Matt every time he closed his eyes for longer than it took to blink. But there would be other moments, and they would replace this one. This moment wasn't one of his best.

*

He drove all night, and when Matt finally caught up, he was going to kick Charlie's ass for being an idiot and coming after him, for getting mixed up in the whole mess. Then he was going to kiss Charlie until he couldn't breathe, until he fell apart and forgot his own name. And then Matt was going to kick his ass some more for taking off, for making Matt chase him across three states and through eight cities in a rental car that had a bad suspension and the most irritating rattle he had ever heard whenever he pushed the speedometer above ninety.

And Matt was an expert at driving like an idiot, but how in the _hell_ did Charlie manage to drive seven hours without once stopping for a burger or a coffee or to pick up his fucking phone? How was that even human? Because Matt hadn't stopped once he hit California again, and he'd kept the speedometer buried most of the way, and he still hadn't caught up, hadn't gotten Charlie to answer or stop his car or wait, for just a minute, long enough for Matt to see him there, to say—something.

So if he did catch up? If he caught up—and he would, if only because Charlie would eventually hit the ocean and he didn't own a boat—Matt was going to give Charlie a piece of his mind. And then he was going to—well, he wasn't sure what came after that.

He hadn't even changed out of the clothes that he'd been given after Cheryl debriefed him. He was still grimy and he was twitching from the thermos of espresso Frank had tossed at him on the way to the car. His eyes felt like they had needles behind them and Matt really, really wanted a shower and a bed and to get out of the fucking car for just a goddamn minute—was that Charlie's car that just went past?

*

Somewhere around San Francisco, Charlie realized that he hadn't turned his phone back on after he suited up for the raid. He left it there, lying on the seat beside him, blissfully silent for once, all the way to Los Angeles, because everyone knew where he was going, why he hadn't stayed.

Eventually it was too quiet, between having lost his tapes on a highway in Nevada and the static of radio stations he didn't want to listen to. He didn't want to hear anyone else's voice. But he plugged the phone back in, because he'd started to feel vaguely guilty about not listening to it.

All of the missed calls—twenty-two of them—were from the same number, but whoever it was didn't leave a message. Charlie didn't feel like debriefing. He didn't call back.

When the phone rang again, he'd just begun hallucinating. Because that had looked like Matt, for a moment, in the car he'd just passed. It wasn't Matt's car, but it had looked like a memory, for an instant, for a few seconds, for the space between one breath and the next.

He couldn't help but follow it, just to convince himself that he was losing his mind.

And then Charlie answered the phone, just to have something real to focus on. Now was not a good time to lose his grip on reality completely.

*

Matt hit redial when he saw Charlie's car go past, and when it picked up, he started talking. "Charlie, if you don't pull over I will shoot holes in your shiny car. Do you want to explain that to the guys at the shop again? Because I'm betting this time they don't let you have it back. I'm turning around, pull over." Matt could almost hear Charlie thinking too hard. "I mean it, Crews, I need to talk to you and I'm not doing it over the phone. We're done with the emails, and we're done with the phone calls, and we're so fucking _done_ with dark parking lots. Pull the car over and wait for me."

Charlie sounded like he was trying not to laugh, or cry. "You first."

Matt checked his mirror and then he pulled off to the side of the road and got out of the car, listened to Charlie coming back. He didn't hang up until he saw the lights flashing as Charlie ran a stop sign and jerked his car up to the curb on the other side of the street.

*

Charlie had to admit, this was one of his better hallucinations. Usually when he imagined this part, he forgot the way that annoyance and hesitation chased over Matt's expression. He forgot the way that Matt walked, as if the ground would always be right where he expected, as if he never had to look down.

And then Matt stopped, and shrugged, and ran his hand over the back of his neck and looked at his feet, and Charlie would never have imagined that, the nervous grimace Matt gave, so this was real. That was—a relief, he supposed. It hadn't been much fun being crazy, and so he was glad that he wasn't again.

*

Matt should have spent more time thinking of the words to say, and less time planning out all the ways he was going to make Charlie regret dragging him on this ridiculous chase. Because now that it was over, he just wanted—he needed to get this right. But that was always where things began to go wrong. He cleared his throat, and looked over at Charlie. "So now we're even. I saved you, maybe, and now you saved me. Sort of. Anyway, that's it, then. Nothing owed." And that was probably not the way to start. Fuck, this was harder than Matt expected.

Charlie looked annoyed. "We're even." He opened his mouth to say more, but he didn't. He just stood there, looking at Matt, waiting.

Matt searched for something else, something better than this. This was a pretty pathetic conversation, after all that time and energy and distance. After everything. After they— "What did you mean, when you said we were responsible for the lives we save?"

Charlie blinked. "I didn't say that."

Matt shook his head, because of course not. Of course Frank was as big a yenta as the rest of them. Fucking Frank and his shitty coffee, coffee that was making Matt's shoulders knot and his fingers twitch and his brain run in circles. "You didn't—right. You wouldn't. The whole thing has been—you haven't even—fuck. Okay, whatever. This was a bad idea. I'm sorry I even mentioned it."

Charlie reached out his hand, and Matt stared at it, hanging there in the space between them. Charlie's fingers were shaking, too. "Matt, just—I didn't say it, not then, I have no idea what I would have said then, but I'd say it now. Now I know what it means. I'd say it."

"And what would it mean, if you said it? I'm not saying you should, I'm not saying that I want to hear it and I'm going to punch Frank the next time I see him for any number of reasons, but—what does it mean?"

Charlie took another step forward. "I have no idea. But that's exactly the point, isn't it? That's where it starts. That's where it ends. The whole thing is just that we don't know what we know until we know it. We can't, we shouldn't. We need to stop wanting to know where we're going, and just be here where we are."

"That has nothing to do with—forget it, never mind. Seriously, that shit doesn't get any less cryptic, just because you spout it so often." Matt couldn't help nodding a little, because Charlie's explanation was strange and meandering and familiar.

Charlie smiled, a real smile, one that went all the way through. He looked away, but he didn't let his hand drop.

***

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [the one with the yoga.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/70757) by [omphale23](https://archiveofourown.org/users/omphale23/pseuds/omphale23)
  * [Catch and Release](https://archiveofourown.org/works/70758) by [omphale23](https://archiveofourown.org/users/omphale23/pseuds/omphale23)
  * [Consilience](https://archiveofourown.org/works/70759) by [omphale23](https://archiveofourown.org/users/omphale23/pseuds/omphale23)
  * [the one from Emily's perspective](https://archiveofourown.org/works/70718) by [omphale23](https://archiveofourown.org/users/omphale23/pseuds/omphale23)




End file.
